The Clean Books Bill

MANUEL KOMROFF

The 11)205 in America was a changing and unsettled time—Coolidge in
the White House, Wall Street frenzy and the dark days of the Depres¬
sion just ahead, New York Tammany Hall riding high. Prohibition,
racketeering and the crusades for censorship. Nowhere were the latter
pressures more apparent than in the field of publishing. The Greenwich
Village bookstore proprietor Albert Boni, and Horace Liveright, a
New York businessman, formed their publishing house in i^ij and
made publishing history with their series of reprints of the classics. The
Modern Library, edited from i()2i until i<^2y by the novelist Mamiel
Komroff. Among Komroff's papers, now in the Rare Book and Manu¬
script Library, is the unpublished manuscript history, '^The Liveright
Story." The chapter from this manuscript printed below with the per¬
mission of the author's widow, recounts the efforts and surprises that
led to the defeat in the New York State Legislature of "The Clean
Books Bill," promoted in 1^2; by John S. Sumner, the lawyer who
had succeeded Anthony Comstock as secretary of the vigilant Society
for the Suppression of Vice. New York City's future mayor, the dap¬
per and debonair Jimmy Walker, Democratic minority leader of the
State Senate during the i<)2os, was instrumental in getting the bill de¬
feated through his own personal brand of melodramatic and flamboy¬
ant strategy.
 

T
 

(/" If ^HE unrest of the times was reflected in the books that
published. There was a fresh outlook and a new
spirit. But this new spirit was restrained by the iron bands
of Puritanism and Victorian inhibitions.

There was resentment in the American heart at the loss of the
older freedom and individual dignity. The rugged individualism
of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman was stifled. Van Wyck
Brooks in a chapter that he wrote for Harold Stern's Civilization
in America thought that the failure of American literature was

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