Longer Lives, Faster Times

The story of a Victorian prude who lived an uncomfortably long life

We live far longer than ever, on average, while the pace of life and cultural change has accelerated far beyond anything that could have been imagined in centuries past. Combined, those two facts can produce strange results.

I came across one recently, while poking around The New Yorker archives.

Specfically, I found it in “Talk of the Town” feature of the October 4, 1930 issue. (“Talk of the Town” turns out to be a feature that started in the very first issue of The New Yorker in 1925. Even the Talk of the Town banner — the dandy with a monocle alongside an owl — is the same. It’s astonishing how similar those almost century-old issues are with those on newsstands today. Perhaps more remarkably, those ancient issues even read (mostly) fresh and witty today. I may write something about this some time.) It was an item about self-censorship in the new and booming industry of broadcast radio.

If a radio performer should suddenly go mad and start screaming and cursing in the middle of his act, the control-man would promptly shut him off. Every broadcasting stations has a control-man listening in all the time. We are told, however, that no such thing has ever happened, although there is a classic radio anecdote about a bed-time story speak who, after telling of the rabbit and the fox and bidding his tiny listeners good night, wiped his brow and said, “Well, I guess that will hold the little ——s.” He thought he had been disconnected, but he hadn’t.

New Yorker writers of this era were famously sardonic and they routinely ribbed broadcasters who were, by all accounts, terrified of offending anyone. (Which makes it a little amusing that The New Yorker wouldn’t print “shits” but instead counted on the filthy minds of its readers to fill in the blank.)

“Studios have a printed list of Don’ts covering the mention of trade names, appeals for funds, plagiarism, prize contests, lotteries, etc. but no list of banned words.” They didn’t need them. Everyone knew that anything that could offend anyone was banned, all the way down to “hell” and “damn.” Even an exclamation like “good God!” was not allowed, although, “if a sketch is pretty dramatic and tense, “good Lord!” may be permitted.

The radio listeners are great letter-writers and are always sending in word about what they don’t like on a program. When [Charles] Lindbergh broadcast recently, the radio people played “America” instead of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and more than fifty people wrote compelling against the band’s playing “God Save the King.” [America is better known as My Country ‘Tis of Thee and its tune is the same as God Save the King/Queen’s.] A few weeks ago, in a war sketch, the lines called for one soldier to yell out, “What do you think you are — a Y.M.C.A. secretary?” After discussion this line was left in. They expected an avalanche of letters in protest. Only one came, from John S. Sumner, the vice man.”

Naturally, I had to spend the following half hour learning about a man who would sit down and write a letter complaining about this outrageous slur against Y.M.C.A. secretaries everywhere.

It turns out that John S. Sumner really was “the vice man.” He headed the “New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,” an organization that, as its name promised, stuck its nose into everybody’s business and gave those who deserved it a damned good — sorry, darned good — frowning. Or fines. Or jail. The Society was an enthusiastic advocate of censorship. They successfully went after Ulysses. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Anything about birth control. They had bathhouses raided and shuttered. They forced publishers to cut violence from novels about gangsters. They got Mae West sent to jail for ten days when she starred in her first Broadway production.

Sumner was also notorious for bringing civil and criminal actions against anyone who ridiculed him or his organization.

You can be sure that a great many readers of The New Yorker in 1930, when they got to that line about John S. Sumner, groaned out loud. “Good God! That Victorian prig.”

But even in 1930, as this little anecdote illustrates, Sumner was out of step with the times. Intellectuals like Virginia Woolf had reviled and discarded Victorian repression long before. And these were the last days of the Jazz Age, a time when, as Frederick Lewis Allen famously wrote in Only Yesterday, American culture was obsessed with dancing, fun, and, most of all, sex. Sumner was an anachronism.

So I looked for his birth and death dates.

He was born in 1876. That made sense. Sumner was a young man at the height of Victorianism. Getting into the suppression of vice business at that time would have been a bit like a young Dustin Hoffman getting into plastics. It was a good career move.

In 1930, when Sumner valiantly defended Y.M.C.A. secretaries, he was 54. Business was down, to be sure, but after decades fighting evil, he had a brand to protect and he was hardly going to let all that jazz and gin lighten him up. “One of the last plays Mr. Sumner attended,” noted The New York Times in his obituary, “was Wine, Women and Song, in 1942, which the society succeeded in closing.”

Sumner retired from the vice-suppression business in 1950. And he went to his reward — and what a reward it must have been for such a pillar of rectitude — in 1971.

Yes, 1971. Think about that.

This paragon of Victorian tight-assery lived through the whole life and career of Lenny Bruce. He lived through Haight-Ashbury, the Summer of Love, and hippies taking the brown acid at Woodstock. He lived through Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. (Google it, Millennials.)

He almost lived long enough to see Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat.

In 1972, George Carlin released a classic comedy album in which he mocked broadcasting rules that forbade the seven deadly words which everyone aged 50 and older still knows by heart — shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.

And the man who went after Ulysses, sent Mae West to jail, and defended the honour of Y.M.C.A. secretaries almost lived to hear it.

The mind boggles. And giggles.