Those who think that a minute a Rough Guy finds himself in “the can” he forswears his habitual mental gait and turns for solace to Thomas à Kempis and The Lives of the Saints, has another guess coming.
In a September 1930 Writer’s Digest piece, “The NEW Gangster Story,” Joseph Lichtblau sided with the analysis of the censors (the article is reprinted in full in this volume):
Fashions in fiction change with the times. When Prohibition came into being, it was orthodox and accepted technique to have crime punished in the ending of any story dealing with criminal leading protagonists. Then the wave of crime all over the country following the bootlegging racket exploitation by gunmen gave writers nifty new ideas for crook yams, and a flood of sensational gangster stories swept these United States.
The kids who used to read dime novels seized on the new type of magazine with whoops of joy. The stories far exceeded in danger, suspense, thrills and excitement the most glory dime novel yarns they had ever read! But they grew up, these youngsters; they became adolescents and young men, and many of them got dangerous ideas from the racketeer and gangster stories. Many a prison warden can tell you, grimly, that plenty of his “cons” are in “stir” now because they got the idea of becoming gangmen and racketeers solely from these stories, which pictured crime and organized rackets and mobs so alluringly.
Lichtblau suggests a historical sweep not justified by magazines that had been on the newsstands less than two years at the time of his writing; not quite enough time for masses of youths to pass from wide-eyed boyhood to corrupted incarceration. But Lichtblau raises the question of what Hersey’s target age group might have been for the gang pulps. One doesn’t read these delectably vile stories and think, “great entertainment for kids!”; but at the same time it’s extremely difficult from a modern perspective to determine what an average educated adult, a working-class reader of the pulps, or an adolescent, might have considered acceptable entertainment in 1930.
In Pulpwood Editor, Hersey confirms that he considered young readers part of the audience, and addresses the corruption question:
The same objections that were voiced against my making heroes out of hoodlums in Gangster Stories were heard on every hand in the yellowback weekly days. I have yet to hear of an instance where a reader turned to a criminal career after buying this or any other pulpwood magazine. The earnest, well-meaning critics forget always that the normal youngster or oldster who devours these adventure tales, takes it all out in the reading. It is the proverbial water on the duck’s back, so far as harm to him is concerned.
Hersey also addressed the age-group question from an oblique angle:
As a rule it is the older reader who points to misspelled words, split infinitives or errors in fact. Boys seldom criticize grammatical mistakes; girls even less.
We introduce this quote because Hersey’s gang pulps rank among the worst-edited, most ungrammatical fiction in all of the pulps. For all his fame as an editor, Hersey seemed to apply little or no effort to smoothing out what is often execrably rough prose. Sentences are poorly constructed; sometimes the narrative meanders for paragraphs before the action becomes apparent; often, the irrational punctuation wouldn’t pass a third-grade exam. And, to make it even harder on the reader, there are the kind of errors that can be attributed to the drinking habits of the typesetter. We’ve exercised a light touch in cleaning up the stories for reprint, simply to improve readability problems; but some stories were considered too laborious to decipher and rejected for inclusion (we do have standards).
At any rate, a direct link between gang pulps and youth crime will not be proven nor disproven here, or anywhere else — which makes it a perfect subject to argue over — and we’ll leave it at that.
Not everyone took Sumner seriously. While the New York Herald Tribune made the attack on Gangster and Racketeer a front-page item, The Hartford Courant consigned the story to a humor column, The Lighter Side (February 20, 1930):
Gangster Stories and Racketeer Stories, two recent additions to the news stands, are to be withdrawn from publication...
Now this is all very well, but is Mr. Sumner going to stop here? What, for instance, does he intend to do to the publishers of E. W. Hornung’s stories about that super-crook, “Raffles”? Will he take no action, in the case of Louis Joseph Vance’s “Lone Wolf,” and what, if anything, is to be done about that other evil character, the “Grey Seal,” a product, as we remember, of Frank W. Packard’s nimble brain? And if Mr. Sumner takes action against all these immoral fellows, can he consider his job finished until he has rooted out from the library shelves of New York the last scrap and vestige of that French felon whom Gaston Leroux gave to an innocent world — Arsene Lupin?
There’s no question that the gang pulps had crossed a threshold, but the Courant highlighted the challenge facing any censor, that of defining the problem so that it targets only the offending material, and not some similar, inoffensive material. Could New York’s law have been amended to add a “lovable rogue” exception?
In Pulpwood Editor (1937), Hersey defended the gang pulps. He neglected to mention Sumner, but contradicted his main objection:
I was careful never to permit an underworldling to triumph over justice. He got his deserts — and no mistake — in the end. It is true that I rather passed over the details of the hero’s mob and was unsportsmanlike in the manner in which I detailed the criminal activities of the opposition; and I did not have the stories based on law and order, but in those days I would have been out of step with the masses had I done so. My hero was not usually permitted to go through reformation at the close à la Mr. Dombey; not at all; this would have made the stories monotonous. Generally speaking, he was associated with a gang against his will, to right a wrong, avenge a friend’s injury or death (just as so many soldiers went berserk in the War), save the heroine from the villain’s clutches, or, as a sleuth in disguise, run untold risks by joining some mob and learning its secrets from the inside. You couldn’t fool the public by setting up conflict between officialdom and the racketeers; they knew too well that in many large cities the two were one and the same under their tough hides.
His defense, as we’ve already determined, is definitely not applicable to the stories published before the controversy hit. Underworldlings did triumph over justice. Perhaps the purest example is “One Hour Before Dawn” (Gangster Stories, December 1929). Mob boss Jim Regan is doing time in the Big House. Meanwhile, his associate, Italian Joe Mercurio, has taken Regan’s moll, and obtained a small fortune from a crime Regan had carefully planned. Regan bribes his way out of prison, and reclaims the girl and the money. At the end of the story, the happy couple looks forward to living on “easy street,” on “the continent,” with no expectation that the law will ever catch up to them.
Hersey’s defense, however, does apply to stories published immediately post-controversy. He chose to adjust the product rather than battle New York’s anti-blood lust law in court. Apparently, some accommodation was reached with Sumner. The explicit terms of the agreement are not available to us but the deal itself was mentioned, for instance, in Lichtblau’s article: “in New York City, particularly, [Hersey’s] magazines were forbidden on the stands until he agreed to change them radically.” Hersey described the stakes in Pulpwood Editor: “I faced a legal battle that could be renewed with every succeeding issue which would cost me far more than I could make by selling the magazine in New York City.” Neither Gangster nor Racketeer missed a monthly issue during this period; whether the magazines were distributed in New York without interruption is a separate issue.