Note 9 — Chapter I · The Case Against the Puritans

The author of this book had a first-hand impression of the power of the American woman as a censor when, in a certain city of the West, an Association of Christian Mothers interfered to stop the production of Charles Vildrac’s “Paquebot Tenacity.” Vildrac’s play, for the un-Puritan critic, is a most moral play. It dramatizes the problem of free will. It stages the conflict between a strong and a weak man, both of them in the hands of Fate. The American “mothers” did not see these moral issues. They were only concerned with a dialogue between one of the characters and a maid around a bottle of champagne. The suppression in New York City more recently of “The Captive,” a Freudian play of the first order, marked another triumph for the “motherly complex.” Eugene O’Neill’s Ibsenian drama “Desire under the Elms” was interdicted in Los Angeles lately by the same “complex.” Meanwhile nude exhibitions which could hardly be tolerated even in Montmartre are allowed to proceed along every “gay White Way” throughout the United States.