LITERATURE AND THE BASTINADO


[Illustration: Ben Hecht chopping away at the ever-forgiving and
all-condoning Bugaboo of Puritanism.]

BEN HECHT

Surveying the trend of modern literature one must, unless one's mental
processes be complicated with opaque prejudices, wonder at the
provoking laxity of the national censorship. I write from the
viewpoint of an aggrieved iconoclast.

It becomes yearly more obvious that the duly elected, commissioned and
delegated high priests of the nation's morale are growing blind to the
dangers which assail them. If not, then how does it come that such
enemies of the public weal as H. L. Mencken, Floyd Dell, Sherwood
Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Dos Passos, Mr. Cabell, Mr. Rascoe, Mr.
Sandburg, Mr. Sinclair Lewis are not in jail? How does it come
Professor Frinck of Cornell is not in jail? Bodenheim, Margaret
Anderson, Mr. John Weaver are not in jail.

Were I the President of the United States sworn to uphold the dignity
of its psychopathic repressions, pledged on a stack of Bibles to
promote the relentless pursuit and annihilation of other people's
happiness, I would have begun my reign by clapping H. L. Mencken into
irons forthwith. Mr. Cabell, I would have sent to Russia. Sherwood
Anderson I would have boiled in oil.