Theatre: Noncensorship

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Broadway has lately blazed with headlines: "Sex Plays Raided," "Police Rout Vice Show," etc. etc. What actually occurred was more polite. By arrangement with the managements, detectives called in police limousines for the actors, actresses, producers and authors of The Captive, Sex and The Virgin Man. They called after the evening performances, like well-behaved escorts. In night court, pleased judges accepted packets of bail. Then everyone posed for flashlight pictures. The hearings were vaguely postponed. Day courts furnished the theatres with injunctions against further "persecution."

The flurry saved the day for The Virgin Man, which was close to failure. After the "raid" Author-Manager William F. Dugan was obliged to seek a bigger theatre to accommodate the sympathetic public. Sex and The Captive had been running for eleven and five months, respectively. They now looked good for another season. One manager joked: "We'll fight it out on this line if it takes all Sumner."

People who wondered why the Manhattan police had waited so long to descend upon plays against which there had been no popular or critical outcry, found an explanation in this quip. John S. Sumner is not in Who's Who but no man of 50 with an undistinguished record ever had a better chance to get there eventually. He, in this day of homosexual theatre, is the undisputed heir of Anthony Comstock, professional vice warrior.

Eleven years ago, the late Mr. Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had to find a new chief. Mr. Sumner, then a Wall Street lawyer, landed the job. He guesses he inclined to it because his ancestors were Puritans, one was a Mayflower passenger, and because obscene pictures were twice showed to him by rowdies at high school. He moved into the cosy office in West 22nd Street, where the basement is jammed with part of Crusader Comstock's 61 carloads of assorted obscenity. He strove cheerfully to administer well the $15,000 per annum supplied him by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Colgate (soap) family, Thomas Alva Edison and other earnest souls. He concentrated his efforts upon enforcing Section 1141 of New York's penal code, a famed paragraph lobbied through by the whiskered subject of the Suppression office's chief portrait. He suppressed Jurgen, famed allegory by James Branch Cabell. He did quite well until 1919 when he inadvertently attacked Harper & Bros. for publishing the dull biography of a prostitute. He obtained a conviction, but Harpers won their appeal in New York's highest court, which weakened Comstockian Section 1141 by holding that questionable art or literature is guiltless unless it "tends to excite lustful or lecherous desire." Tendencies are such vague things that Mr. Sumner's record fell off from 150 convictions in 1920 to 14 in 1924, 21 in 1925.