Literary Obscenities

Front matter

PAOLIDA OBSCENITIES es

-

U.S. CASE LAW AND NATURALISM AFTER MODERNISM

Contents

Erskine Caldwell, Smut, and the Paperbacking of Obscenity 95

Sin, Sex, and Segregation in Lillian Smith’s Silent South

Acknowledgments

II

The negative processes slowly unfolding across the early twentieth century in literary texts and courtrooms also sensitize us to the anxieties evoked by obscene texts and “provocative” literary naturalist ones, both of which straddled the shifting boundaries between literature and paraliterature. Cockburn, it will be remembered, quite pointedly demurred from making an exception on behalf of works of high literary value in his test for obscenity in Hicklin. Just because an obscene text possessed literary merit did nothing to detract from or otherwise qualify its capacities to deprave and corrupt those whose minds were open to such influences and into whose hands such a work might have happened to fall. Fittingly enough, then, throughout this period books frequently found themselves proscribed on grounds of obscenity alongside religious pamphlets, advertising circulars, photographs, contraception guides, sex manuals, nudist magazines, and instruments of abortion, among other apparently nonliterary objects of legal disapproval.

The first effective legal challenge to this lack of distinction between obscene works and literary ones did not take place in the United States until 1894, when Anthony Comstock, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, opposed the sale ofa collection of books as part of the assets of the recently insolvent Worthington Company. Included among these assets were Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1782-89), Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), the collected works of Rabelais, Boccaccio’s The Decameron (circa 1353), and Ovid's The Art of Love (1 c.z.)—all of which Comstock claimed were examples of “immoral literature” that were so far beyond the sanction of New York state law that they could not be offered for sale within its borders.* The members of the New York Supreme Court, however, were ultimately unconvinced by Comstock’s bold assertions:

It is very difficult to see upon what theory these world-renowned classics can be regarded as specimens of that pornographic literature which it is the office of the Society for the Suppression of Vice to suppress, or how they can come under any stronger condemnation than that high standard literature which consists of the works of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, of Laurence Sterne, and of other great English writers, without making reference to many parts of the Old Testament Scriptures, which are to be found in almost every household in the land. The very artistic character, the high qualities of style, the absence of those glaring and crude pictures, scenes, and descriptions which affect the common and vulgar mind, make a place for books of the character in question, entirely apart from such gross and obscene writings as it is the duty of the public authorities to suppress. ... A seeker after the sensual and degrading parts of a narrative may find in all these works, as in those of other great authors, something to satisfy pruriency. But to condemn a standard literary work, because of a few of its episodes, would compel the exclusion from circulation of a very large proportion of the works of fiction of the most famous writers of the English language.“

Tacitly calling into question not only the scope of Hicklin’s test but also its methods of proscribing entire texts on the basis of brief or isolated passages, In re Worthington

Company set an important precedent for taking into account the literary merit of a charged book by defending the classics and “standard literary work[s]” against obscenity prosecutions in the state of New York.

While the Woolsey test articulated in United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses” in 1933 may be the most famous instance of a lower court judge extending this carefully observed distinction between legal obscenity and literature to a contemporary book, it was Judge Augustus Hand’s affirmation of Woolsey’s opinion and ruling in United States v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses” the following year that even more trenchantly expressed the growing sense among liberalizing judges and jurists that whatever obscenity may have once consisted of, it was probably not going to include the literary anymore: “We think the same immunity should apply to literature as to science, where the presentation, when viewed objectively, is sincere, and the erotic matter is not introduced to promote lust and does not furnish the dominant note of the publication. The question in each case is whether a publication taken as a whole has a libidinous effect. The book before us has such portentous length, is written with such evident truthfulness in its depiction of certain types of humanity, and is so little erotic in its result, that it does not fall within the forbidden class?‘ At least two things are worth noting here. First, because it was (on the whole) long-winded, frank, and not very titillating, Ulysses was almost certainly a specimen of literature, meaning that it was not to be mistaken for an instance of obscenity since literature was literature and obscenity was obscenity. Second, the immunity prospectively extended to literature by Hand was expressly modeled after exceptions made earlier on behalf of scientific works, thus securing the recognition of literature as its own field by way of the immunity already granted to a wholly different one. The story of literary value in U.S. obscenity case law, therefore, should not omit the interdisciplinary pressures exerted by science on literature and vice versa. Given the foundational appeals to “scientific” values in naturalism—starting with Zola’s programmatic essay, “The Experimental Novel” (1880)—a shift in focus from the texts of modernism to those of literary naturalism becomes all the more exigent.

Although the literary value test broached here would ultimately win out forty years later in Miller v. California, the 1930s and 1940s were hardly a period in which this view ended up getting seamlessly ratified court by court and state by state. For instance, in the notoriously censorious Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which made “banned in Boston” a household phrase, an especially subtle appropriation of holistic tests occurred in the 1940s, albeit with the important difference that questions of literary merit ended up being evaluated in an entirely different way. In Commonwealth v. Isenstadt, for instance, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court argued that literary value was not all that relevant to determining whether or not a given text was proscribably obscene: “It is possible that, even in the mind of the general reader, overpowering sincerity and beauty may sometimes entirely obscure or efface the evil effect of occasional questionable passages, especially with respect to the classics of literature that have gained recognized place as part of the great heritage of humanity. The question will commonly be one of fact in each case, and if, looking at the book as a whole, the bad is found to persist in substantial degree alongside the good, as the law now stands, the book will fall within the statute.’® In proscribing Lillian Smith's naturalist antilynching novel, Strange Fruit, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reminded judges, jurists, and writers everywhere that obscenity was indeed not not literature, because it was impossible to distinguish salacious literature from the claims of indecency, impurity, and corruption effectively mounted by obscene works more generally. In fact, if anything, the beauty and sincerity of good writing provided authors with the means of camouflaging the unruly claims of their obscene passagework, making certain parts of their texts all the more indecent, impure, and corrupt. The literariness of literary works potentially made them more, not less, obscene.

Since the late nineteenth century, however, literary naturalism in the United States had provided reliable occasions to doubt the self-sufficiency of “literature” as a meaningful category in the reception of fiction. Just as Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) had presented itself as being of a piece with the urban ethnographic and psychological analyses inaugurated by Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), Theodore Dreiser quite self-consciously described his early fiction as metaphoric reappropriations of Herbert Spencer’s materialist metaphilosophy, particularly as it was expressed in First Principles (1862).” Likewise, in the return of naturalist fiction in the interwar period, sociological and eugenic discourses came more to the fore, particularly in the novels of James T. Farrell and Erskine Caldwell, respectively.* More recently, Christopher L. Hill has made the compelling case that this confusion of literary naturalism with other “non-literary genres of social knowledge” was indispensable to its development not only in the United States but also in other countries: “The rise of naturalist schools around the world was the result of the circulation of multiple genres, literary and otherwise, through distinct paths whose intersections were enormously varied but mutually reinforcing in the aggregate. Naturalist fiction would have been unlikely to travel so widely without these other genres, or they without it or each other” Not purely literary by nature, literary naturalism has always constituted itself as an alloyed mode of writing in which sociological, psychological, evolutionary, physiological, criminological, and other extraliterary discourses have been adopted and transformed by self-identified naturalist writers the world over.

Following the attacks mounted against it in the first half of the century and the structural analysis that it subsequently underwent, literary naturalism fittingly enough became a privileged object of study for the New Historicism. After all, the interpretive procedure of structural homology, most forthrightly put into practice in Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987) but also implicit in June Howard’s Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (1985), is predicated upon a refusal of context: nothing is background because everything is foregrounded. For instance, nothing in Caroline Meeber’s milieu or situation “explains” her in Sister Carrie (1900). Instead, everything about her, her milieu, and her situation can be transformed into everything else.” Consequently, the same entanglement plays itself out again and again in New Historicist criticism: “literature tries to distinguish itself with respect to other social and cultural formations and fails?” Not revolt, but cooptation is the paradigmatic story told by New Historicism, and the fact that literary naturalism already collapses the literary and the social into one messy heap meant it was a ready-made venue for critics in the 1980s to explore—rather than traduce—the ramifications of this unconsoling worldview.”

Among many early twentieth-century critics, however, U.S. literary naturalism’s uncomfortably close associations with nonliterary discourses were cause for disdain rather than for doubts about the possibility of adopting an oppositional stance in the first place. A notable expression of this is Malcolm Cowley’s “Naturalism in American Literature” (1950), which poses the tradition of naturalist writing in the United States—from Frank Norris, Crane, and Dreiser through to Farrell, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright—as one bound together principally by a spirit of rebellion against gentility and orthodoxy.” Glumly assessing the pseudoscientific objectivity of naturalist writing in terms that emphasize its fundamental misapprehension of scientific materials and methods, Cowley contends that one of the manifest shortcomings of the naturalist tradition in the United States has been its tendency “always to explain the complex in terms of the simple: society in terms of self, man in terms of his animal inheritance, and the organic in terms of the inorganic. The result is that something is omitted at each stage in this process of reduction. To say that man is a beast of prey or a collection of chemical compounds omits most of man’s special nature; it is a metaphor, not a scientific statement?” By confusing figural language with the presentation of facts and the procedures used to test the validity of those facts, naturalism manages to evacuate literature of its own authentically literary forms, functions, and effects, including—most troublingly in Cowley’s estimation—the ability to tell credible tragic narratives:

This scientific weakness of naturalism involves a still greater literary weakness, for it leads to a conception of man that makes it impossible for naturalistic authors to write in the tragic spirit. They can write about crimes, suicides, disasters, the terrifying, and the grotesque; but even the most powerful of their novels and plays are case histories rather than tragedies in the classical sense. Tragedy is an affirmation of man’s importance; it is “the imitation of noble actions,’ in Aristotle’s phrase; . . . for the naturalists, however, men are “human insects” whose brief lives are completely determined by society or nature. The individual is crushed in a moment if he resists; and his struggle, instead of being tragic, is merely painful or ironic, as if we had seen a mountain stir itself to overwhelm a fly.”

A year before “Naturalism in American Literature” appeared, Philip Rahv voiced a similar dissatisfaction with the lack of tragic potentials in literary naturalism: “The world of naturalist fiction is much too big, too inert, too hardened by social habit and material necessity, to allow for that tenacious self-assertion of the human by means of which tragedy justifies and ennobles its protagonists.’”* Not the protagonists but the social and natural worlds themselves were the real heroes of naturalist writing, and with this dehumanizing displacement of agency from character to setting, in Rahv’s view, tragedy had been well and truly lost to U.S. fiction for a time. According to Cowley, from beneath the thin conceptual protection provided by its pseudoscientific cover story, literary naturalism had thus spent the past half century traducing the dignity of humanism. People in naturalist fiction were little more than abstractly composed formulae, “the blind result of conditions, forces, physical laws, or nature herself?” Therefore, literary naturalist authors may indeed have deserved credit for having “immensely broadened the scope of American fiction” by integrating materials, social classes, and subject matter hitherto marked off-limits.”* However, in doing so they had relied far too much on “the meanest of everything they describe,’ with the result that this widening of subject matter likewise represented a watering down of U.S. fiction.” When mankind as a whole was not being thoroughly proletarianized in the pages of a naturalist novel, it was undergoing a grotesque ordeal of devolution and degeneration before the reader's very eyes, of which Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute (1914) still provides the most famous (but by no means the only) example: “All in an instant [Vandover] had given way, yielding in a second to that strange hallucination of that four-footed thing that sulked and snarled. Now without a moment's stop he ran back and forth along the wall of the room, upon the palms of his hands and toes, a ludicrous figure, like that of certain clowns one sees at the circus, contortionists walking about the sawdust, imitating some kind of enormous dog.’*? For Cowley and most other mid-twentieth-century critics, the overmastering preoccupation of such naturalist writing with the bestial and the brutish betokened not a serious reflection upon species-being so much as it did an act of juvenile delinquency on the part of the guilty naturalist writers, who could be seen to be gleefully doing the dirty on mankind’s self-image in the name of a mechanistic and filth-obsessed materialism that could only be called, in the words of Oscar Cargill, “pessimistic determinism?” To be sure, not all literary critics at the time were so quick to view naturalism’s representations of the world quite so reductively. For one thing, as Charles Child

Walcutt hastens to point out in American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (1956), the deterministic philosophies so comprehensively excoriated by contemporaries such as Cargill and Cowley do not have to be taken at face value. Just because the ideology espoused by the narrator or by a character in a given naturalist work appears to be mechanistic in the extreme does not necessarily indicate that this same novel is bereft of the means of contradicting or otherwise inflecting this overly simplistic account of the world. In other words, apathy and “mass insensibility” are not the ineluctable results of our reading a novel whose ethos is supposedly consistent with that of literary naturalism.” Instead, according to Walcutt, the naturalist novel in the United States constitutes a complex linguistic artifact informed both by progressive idealism and scientific determinism, the two currents that make up the divided stream of his book's title.®

Due to this animating antagonism between intuition and empirical investigation, naturalist fiction in this country is said to have insinuated itself into all sorts of extraliterary discourses, running the gamut from pure speculative science to the social sciences and on to public policymaking. The result of this scrambling of discourses and institutional authorities is that any sufficient reading of a given naturalist text first has to evaluate the claims and appeals being made by that work within its various interdisciplinary and social contexts. In other words, if a naturalist novel rather conspicuously deprives characters of agency or will, then that deficit is probably being made up for somewhere else. In particular, Walcutt argues that in so graphically denying volition and effective intentionality to the subjects it sets forth, naturalist fiction more often than not ends up transferring intentionality and volition from its characters to its readers and—correlatively—to society itself. If a given work of literary naturalist fiction is in fact correct about the situations it so implacably and gloomily depicts, then society and readers of naturalist fiction are now in a better position to do something about it. Much like Peirce’s processual account of lithium, in which the act of defining lithium gets equated with the activities one has to undertake in order to produce real existing specimens of lithium, naturalist novels in Walcutt’s view have the potential to self-reflexively elaborate the steps by which naturalist milieus and characters get themselves produced off the page and in the real world. Therefore, unlike the pitiless machinations of fate, naturalism’s gruesomely reductive determinisms need not bar the possibilities for amelioration or even revolutionary transformation. Not only mortified but also edified at the sight of the impending mountain, Cowley’s poor fly could, in a collective effort with other like-minded flies, potentially overwhelm it instead: “The more helpless the character [in naturalist writing], the stronger the proof of determinism; and once such a thesis is established the scientist hopes and believes that men will set about trying to control the forces which now control men. ... Thus can the scientists’ ‘optimistic’ purpose be served by a ‘pessimistic’ novel.”*4

In this way, the antihumanist cul-de-sac condemned by Cargill, Cowley, Rahv, and many other mid-twentieth-century critics of U.S. literary naturalist fiction could be meaningfully transformed by bringing out the incipient activist, reformist, and humanist impulses underlying the violence, brutishness, and implacability in all sorts of naturalist works.

Despite the ingeniousness of his reading, however, Walcutt never quite convinces himself that naturalist fiction actually works this way. Instead, he goes on in American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream to insist that “whatever its ultimate social intent, naturalist fiction does not exhort the reader to action.”® As he quite disenchantedly points out: “If some of Zola’s best novels are still read it is because of their logical, integrated, relentless movement toward disaster—not that LAssommoir will discourage drunkenness, or Germinal usher in the Revolution, or Nana apprise us of the evils of sexual license in a decadent society? For Walcutt, therefore, the implicit contradiction between a faith in human progress and a commitment to mechanical determinism in literary naturalist fiction is less an index of unquestioned social optimism through unfolding scientific processes than it is an expression of “a profound uncertainty as to whether science liberates the human spirit or destroys it?” Offering in effect a protodeconstructive interpretation of literary naturalism’s relationship to its putative first principles, Walcutt’s book seeks not merely to undermine the operativity of deterministic philosophies and science in naturalist novels but also to explore the affective terrain on which such things could be erected. According to Walcutt, U.S. literary naturalism’s foundations were originally constructed on fear and doubt in the face of the disturbingly ambiguous effects that modern science was having on human existence at that time. Consequently, once these same scientific developments had successfully started to make inroads into everyday life and even into the subjective interiorities of the masses, the matrix of uneasy affects that had made naturalist writing possible in the first place ceased to exist: “When science has brought us to a moral relativism that substitutes therapy for personal responsibility, the last trickle of the stream of idealism has disappeared, and the divided stream of naturalism has lost a vital half of itself?”

Walcutt’s book accordingly argues that the popularization of science is responsible for the end of naturalism. Inadvertently echoing Wyndham Lewis’ attacks in the 1920s on the utility of cutting-edge scientific research as a means of ideological warfare in the relativization of social, moral, and cultural values, Walcutt contends that the most widespread insights of early twentieth-century science—from the Oedipus complex to the theories of general and special relativity—had become elements of general culture by the first decade of the Cold War, with the result that there no longer seemed to be absolutes on which the doubts and fears of literary naturalism might continue to corrosively act. Instead, existentialism and orthodox

Christianity were now the more timely expressions of the persistence of an idealist faith in nature.” Correlatively, now that its affective wellspring had been depleted, literary naturalism in the 1950s was said to be “[spread] out so far that it covers the whole literary landscape—but very thinly” Naturalism no longer existed as an independent mode of writing, though that did not belie the likelihood that all U.S. fiction would continue to bear a naturalistic impress for some time.

As a result, the problem for critics was increasingly that of recognizing literary naturalism when they saw it. Every writer and critic of naturalism in this period appeared to have his or her own sense of how to define it, and no consensus seemed to be evolving from this clash of informed opinions. Arguably the best expression of literary naturalism’s elusiveness as a concept at this time is to be found in an audio lecture recorded by Erskine Caldwell entitled “Naturalism and the American Novel” (1953). Using the talk mostly to get in some jabs at the same literary critics who had spent the past decade calling into question his worth as a writer of fiction, when they were not simply ignoring him altogether, Caldwell starts by admitting that the “critical man of letters” is “by reason of heritage, birth, and environment, ...a man far superior in mind and morals, and a man who can outtalk a mere writer of fiction anytime, anywhere.’ Consequently, as “a mere writer of fiction,” Caldwell himself must be whatever it is these men of letters say he is. Unfortunately, it seems that these vastly superior men of morality and knowledge cannot quite make up their minds as to what to do with him: “Some critics have called me a realist, and I came to believe them. Other critics have called me a romanticist, and I came to believe them too. Now, if I am to be called a naturalist, I shall no doubt believe that as well, but I can’t be all things, and until the question is resolved for once and for all, I would be content to remain just what I thought I was: a writer of fiction, a storyteller from Georgia.” Despite the sarcasm here, however, Caldwell is emphatically not content to remain a Georgian teller of tales, because the charge of being a naturalist has gotten under his skin like a hookworm, leading him to go on in this audio essay to determine just what “the meaning of such a term as ‘naturalist fiction” might credibly be.”

Caldwell’s principal stalking horse throughout his lecture is American Idealism (1943), in which Floyd Stovall ranged U.S. writers under four headings: Idealists (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Wolfe), Romantic Realists (Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Edna Ferber, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, and John P. Marquand), Sometimes Naturalists or Realists (William Dean Howells, Crane, Hamlin Garland, Norris, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway), and Undisputed Naturalists (Jack London, Dreiser, Faulkner, Farrell, and Caldwell).°? Discovering himself placed among the “Undisputed Naturalists,” Caldwell claims to be “somewhat surprised and well-taken-back too.” Whatever naturalism happened to be ultimately, its widespread use as a label of disapproval among most contemporary critics in the United States leads the world-famous author of Tobacco Road (1932) and Gods Little Acre to quip, “I find that all comfort and peace of mind has been taken from me.’

The remainder of Caldwell’s lecture attempts to cope with this satirically presented dark night of the soul by shifting the shortcomings of literary naturalism from the texts of naturalism to the critics of naturalism themselves. Instead of agreeing with the Cargills and Cowleys of the world in finding literary naturalism to be an unduly pessimistic mode of writing, Caldwell calls the definitional efforts of these same scholars to be “pessimistic to an extreme.” Not naturalist fiction itself but interpreters of naturalism such as Cargill are to blame for its supposed cynicism, doubt, and gloom. Similarly, Cowley is singled out for propagating the erroneous notion that naturalism somehow constitutes the subtraction of all human responsibility from fiction in the United States. Consequently, it is the detractors—and not the writers—of literary naturalism who are said to be proceeding far too deterministically, irresponsibly shutting down the kinds of experiences and ideologies that naturalist fiction can be made to embody or represent in the act of reading itself. According to Caldwell’s lecture, the violent and the ugly, as well as the poverty and class conflicts of life, often exist side by side with “spasms of laughter, the horseplay of humor, and the enjoyment of living” in literary naturalist fiction like his own. Therefore, instead of approaching literature as a “laboratory frog to be sliced, pickled in a jar, and labeled this, that, and the other thing, literary critics in this country in the mid-twentieth century would better serve their reading communities by treating creative writing as if it were “an untamed, rampaging creature ranging the land” and in need of guidance perhaps but not the proscriptions or finicky classifications of a group of men wholly out of touch with the world. Naturalist archetypes thus end up mediating Caldwell’s cheeky account of contemporary writing and the burgeoning Cold War industry of academic literary criticism. Whereas fictional texts are said to constitute the Jack London-esque wolves shiftily roaming the literary landscape in this country, its critics are apparently unprepared to confront or otherwise account for these undomesticated beasts because they are too much like Zerkow, the miserly rag-and-bone man of Norris’s McTeague (1899), fussily coveting and hoarding those objects that have long outlived their use: “Next to a dull novel,’ Caldwell observes, “I don't know anything more depressing than a critic who has mewed himself up from the world, and especially a naturalistic critic?’

IV

These thematic problems and issues raised by U.S. literary naturalism for its mid-century critics ought to make more salient the degree to which the period's arguments over the criminally libidinal appeals of writing encompassed more than just the relationships embodied by chance between mute words and their presumably lewd readers. Literary naturalism was no more depraved, corrupt, offensive, or prurient than any other contemporary mode of writing, though its constitutive incorporation of extraliterary forms of social knowledge and its attention to the impact of societal forces upon personal identity made it better suited than most to reflect upon the putative uses—normal and aberrant—to which writing’s effective force could be put. If early twentieth-century readers really were so in thrall to their somatic responses that books needed to be prohibited for their illicit solicitations, then the threats evoked by the potential manipulability of irrational consumers went well beyond masturbatory gratification.

This concern over the embodied subsumption of identities gets trenchantly thematized throughout the three volumes of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, which details the deleterious impact of mass urban life in the early twentieth-century United States on historical consciousness, particularly that of its titular protagonist. In fact, as the frightening exemplification of these effects, William “Studs” Lonigan has “no language and no experience, whether societal, personal, or physical, which he can genuinely call his own?” Depicting modernity in the first decades of the last century as an impoverishment not just of language but of experience, Studs Lonigan again and again calls into question the operativity of literature as an autonomous sphere of human activity by ranging all writing within the context of mass culture, the nature and functions of which prove to be far from affirmative.

Frequently, the anxieties and concerns evoked by this get expressed in satirical episodes like the mission sermon described in the twenty-first chapter of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), where Father Shannon declaims against a number of writers on the grounds that their books are “vile,” as are the sins to which they tend to lead their readers:

And if I met the authors of the books I shall mention, I should tell them to their faces (his voice rose, almost to a shout): “Your books are vile. In order to make a sale for them, you fill them with spiritual poison, with all the resources of your filthy and putrid minds. For thirty pieces of silver, you sign your names to oozing immorality. You are worse than dogs! You are the vilest of the vile, the most vicious of the vicious, lower than snakes, you rats who write books to rob youth of its shining silvered innocence!”

And just who are these Judas-like “rats who write books”? Father Shannon singles out Sinclair Lewis, whose novel Elmer Gantry (1927) is said to make a mockery of “the most sacred profession that man can enter”; Judge Ben Lindsey, whose Companionate Marriage (1927), “like the anarchistic, atheistic Bolshevists in unhappy Russia, says (his arms flung out in a gesture): ‘Away with the holy bonds of Matrimony!”; H. L. Mencken, whose articles spread the gospel of nihilism and blasphemy to American youths who thereafter “think themselves (sneering) smart”; H. G. Wells, whose popularization of evolutionary outlooks marks him out as an egotist and materialist of the lowest kind; and the various propagandizing writers of birth control pamphlets, who do nothing but instigate a lack of sexual continence throughout the United States (SL, 437-40). Suitably, the result of all these bad influences—together with “Filthy movies. Newspapers. The doctrines in universities aimed to destroy morality” (SL, 441)—threatens nothing less than the end of the United States of America because “vile” books such as these are said by Father Shannon to be leading not just good Catholic men and women but in fact all Americans toward “that drastic, terrible fate which befell the proud and mighty empire of Rome” (444). Since they appear to be especially efficacious instruments of a degrading mass culture, books are therefore more than an affront to Catholic or American morals; more importantly, they are also potentially a mortal threat to all nations, no matter the time or place.