Lastly, as writers’ mag analysts were quick to point out, the gangster story was as closely related to the adventure story as to the mystery or detective, emphasizing action over crime detection.
So that’s the layout of gangland, more or less, and what’s wrong with that? It’s easy to view the stories today as a “guilty pleasure” — they are fun to read — or as an unclouded window onto the past. But, in their time, they carried, though not the accomplishment of literature, the power. It’s inherent in fiction that taking a character’s point of view makes that character sympathetic to some degree: as practiced by true artists of the written word, a great degree. Fiction allows us to be someone else momentarily, to live in another place or time, to see the world from an alien point of view, and thus gain understanding and a greater sense of humanity. But these gang stories represent a perversion of those purposes. By bringing gangland into the foreground, and flattening “the civilian world” to a ghosted background, gangland is redefined as the standard of normality. We hear only the voices of the gang members. The worst of us can justify any behavior, and the justification can be discovered in the argument both for and against some action. “I had to steal. I was hungry.” “I had to shoot him. He questioned my manhood.” True enough. In the pulp story, if acting out the argument in favor produces the most exciting story, then arguments against dwindle to insignificance.
This is neither to praise or condemn these stories for their socially redeeming value, or lack thereof — they’ve scarcely been read since original publication — but to get a sense of how the society of the time, other than the thrill-seekers who found the magazines entertaining, might have perceived them. Which brings up the next question: what happened?
In February 1930, Hersey’s Good Story Magazine Company was threatened with prosecution by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV). The vice that need be suppressed: Gangster Stories, which had been appearing for a few months, and Racketeer Stories, which had its first or second issue on the newsstands.
The NYSSV, with its grandiose title, sounded like a holdover from the Victorian era, which in some sense it was. Charted in 1873 by the state legislature, its mission, as stated in its annual report for 1928, was “to enforce certain laws intended to strengthen and perpetuate American standards of morality and to discourage the dissemination of publications or other matters whose effect would be to break down those standards.” The key figure in the NYSSV was executive secretary John S. Sumner, who had led the organization since 1915, succeeding its founder, Anthony Comstock. In an interview with the New York Times (October 9, 1932), Sumner described how his office operated:
...we initiate no complaints on our own initiative. I choose to regard the Society as an unofficial adjunct of the District Attorney’s office. When a citizen sees something which he feels is contrary to our State laws he complains to us. We investigate the complaint and if we discover that it is well founded we take our findings either to the police or to the District Attorney’s office... I am not carrying out the ideas of our society in any spirit of a reformer. I am only trying to have laws which exist on our statute books enforced... We are only concerned with the violation of that statute which makes it wrong to display or sell indecent objects.
Sumner’s authority was real. An October 5, 1929 report in the Times describes the seizing of 3,000 books from several New York City book dealers. The titles included books by eminent authors James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, and even a writer who appears in this collection, Clement Wood. In his groundbreaking study of censorship of the so-called “sex magazines,” Uncovered: The Hidden Art of the Girlie Pulps, Douglas Ellis describes the many-years’ war of Sumner against magazine publishers. Magazines were seized by the truckload and incinerated to heat police departments. The Catholic magazine, America, described the magazine problem in appropriately dramatic terms (as quoted in a NYT article, October 29, 1929):
The news stands of the metropolis, which ten years ago offered nothing more deleterious than newspapers devoted to athletic contests, now fairly groan under a weight of pamphlets and magazines, of which the best are suspicious and the worst utterly degraded.
America praised Sumner and the Society for their valiant efforts in combating the problem.
To sum up, Sumner was likely acting on a citizen complaint against Gangster and Racketeer; and Hersey had reason to fear. But what possible law was he breaking? There were some frighteningly glamorous molls in the gang pulps, but no real sex.
Sumner had “exhumed,” in the terms of Lemuel F. Parton’s syndicated report (February 21/22, 1930), a thirty-year old state law that banned “magazines devoted to or chiefly made up of bloodshed, lust or crime.” Sumner’s description of the problem was that “Gangsters always triumph at the end of the adventures described in both magazines”; adding, “I especially resent the women who lead the gangs.” So maybe it was about sex... In all probability, there was much more about the stories that bothered Sumner, but these brief quotes are what percolated into the public record.
Good Story’s attorney, Joseph Schultz, conceded that the gang pulps met the law’s definition, but that the law was unconstitutional. He was probably right, though we can only speculate as to how 1930’s courts might have ruled. But right or wrong, challenging the law was an expense Hersey likely never seriously considered.
The magazines were distributed nationally, and the story of Sumner’s threat received national coverage, although of a minor sort. Hersey made it one-day news by pulling the magazines out of New York state — or promising to. Schultz pointed out that there was no Federal equivalent of the New York statute, the magazines would continue, and that New York “does not mean much in the bulk of their circulation.” The last part sounds like bravado. There’s no reason to believe that America’s most populous city (and state) would not have been a significant market for magazines with, essentially, New York stories.
We should also note that Hollywood suffered its own “crime problem” in early ’29. The industry dug into its deep pockets and produced a criminological study authored by a former governor of Maine, which demonstrated that the villain in films always got what was coming to him. Schultz echoed the argument: “In these [gang pulp] stories, the villain always gets the worst of it — as all villains should.” As you will discover in reading through these collected stories, Schultz was sugarcoating his client’s problem — as all lawyers should. The censors may have been tilting against windmills, but they weren’t inaccurate in their charges.
Underlying the backlash was a widespread fear that gang pulps promoted criminal behavior among the young; the same argument being made about video games today, violent movies in the ’60s, rock and roll in the ’50s, sharpened sticks in the Pleistocene, etc. The attitude is reflected in this humorous item from Joseph Van Raalte’s syndicated column, Bo Broadway (February 16, 1931):
A settlement worker asked one of the youthful prisoners in the Tombs to write down the names of the periodicals he bought from the magazine vendor, allowed in the North Annex, reserved for young offenders. The list included: The Underworld, Gun Molls, Gangster Stories and Detective Fiction.