Virtue's Reward

One of the cornerstones of Hearstian journalism is righteous editorial indignation which leads to crusades and, hopefully, to bigger circulation figures. Hearst editors are prepared at a moment's notice to turn the heat up under such standbys as vivisection and habit-forming drugs. Last week they were given a new target: salacious books.

It was as easy as whipping up a campaign against wife-beating. Hearstlings in each of 13 cities sprang to their files of politicians, Legionnaires, churchmen and clubwomen who can always be counted on to say the right thing. They were asked if they liked "filthy books." They didn't. Neither did such writers as Faith Baldwin (Men Are Such Fools') and Clarence Buddington Kelland (The Little Moment of Happiness), whose opinions were splashed across Page One. Next came front-page editorials demanding that erring novelists and their publishers of "best-smellers" be brought to law. Only Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was mentioned specifically; but there were also cracks at "Forever Off-Color."

In Seattle a Hearst Post-Intelligencer reporter went rummaging through the law books, found just what his editor wanted: a stiff 1909 statute aimed at dirty novels. But the P-I decided not to quote it, after reading a little further. Another section of the same statute provided identical punishment (a year in jail, $1,000 fine) for owning, lending, selling, giving away or showing any newspaper "largely made up of criminal news, police reports, accounts of criminal deeds or pictures or stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime." A literal prosecutor, with a sly liking for gamey books, might turn that one against some newspapers.

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