(The film eventually won an Oscar nomination for best picture.) Live theater censorship, against Lillian Hellman’s “The Children’s Hour,” proved to be a bust. The first (and last) attempt at movie censorship, for Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, failed. Magazines continued to provide a fertile field for censorship throughout the ‘30s and ‘40s. Even so, the society refused to call it quits. The publicity that accompanied the banning of books proved to be a boon for authors such as Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair, who stated, “I would rather be banned in Boston than read anywhere else because when you are banned in Boston, you are read everywhere else.”īy the 1930s, the Great Depression redirected everyone’s attention from the great moral issues it also dried up contributions. “Since the Mencken affair nothing seemed to have gone right for the Watch and Ward,” Neil Miller writes. Chase, and he died eight months later.īy 1929, censorship in Boston was in decline.

One year after the American Mercury case, the society’s annual report concluded it had inadvertently “given advertisement to the very thing it is seeking to suppress.” Many members of the board resigned, leading Mencken to observe wryly how “wowsers always desert one another in times of stress.” The episode took its toll on Mr. Many Bostonians were indignant over the bad publicity the case had given the town many withdrew their support from the society. The colorful episode also had dealt the Watch and Ward Society a major blow.

Banned in Boston by Neil Miller