Playboy's History of the Sexual Revolution: Hard Times, Part IV, 1930--1939

You could spend the rest of your life in front of this newsstand. Rack after rack of magazines held in place by long pieces of wire offer fantastic visions of the future, of the past, of the next few hours. The covers are windows on the world of the beautiful and the bold. Screenland shows a couple locked in a passionate embrace. Film Fun features a sexy starlet on its cover. You stare at a photo of Jean Harlow, the blonde bombshell. Her shimmering nightgown seems to move like a river in moonlight. You think there is nothing on earth as alluring as the sight of nipples under silk. Erect nipples. "Would you be shocked," Harlow had asked in Hell's Angels, "if I put on something more comfortable?" Yes, but go right ahead.

God bless lingerie. Models pose provocatively on the covers of Spicy Stories, Spicy Mystery, Spicy Detective Stories. If they could figure out how to get lingerie on a horse, no doubt there would be something similar on the cover of Spicy Western. The editors have to settle for a girl in a revealing peasant blouse. Women with torn dresses and imperiled breasts plead for help on the covers of Dime Detective, Private Detective Stories and True Gangster Stories. There's no doubt about it: Dames spell trouble.

You glance at the woman perusing True Confession, True Story, True Romances, Modern Romance. Bernarr Macfadden's pulp empire reaches 7.4 million readers, mostly women, and he's thinking of running for president. Candid Confessions suggests a possible platform: "As long as the sex urge is one of the most powerful urges in creation, just so long will we have men and women searching for the love-happiness which is every person's birthright. Some of us find it through experiences which almost wreck our lives, others by an easier path. All of us are entitled to find our mate."

If only she would look your way. There's a guy at the other end of the rack studying Apparel Arts and Esquire.

Yeah, a tuxedo's going to look great in the breadline. Still, Esquire has that Petty Girl, wearing a swimsuit that is as skintight and transparent as a suntan.

If it weren't so crowded you might spend a few moments with the nudes in Artists and Models, Body Beautiful or Spotlight: Photo Studies of the Female Form. The art books present models "selected on account of their supple lines, their artistic naturalness and their beautiful development. They reflect the artistic spirit of feminine beauty in our time."

Two bits can buy a world of beauty. Perhaps you should save your money for a movie. The town theaters offer Cagney and Har-low, Powell and Lombard, Fred and Ginger, Gable and Garbo, Gable and Crawford, Gable and Harlow. Or maybe the latest from Mae West.

You go to the movies to escape, to learn good moves, to memorize good lines. Because now the movies talk, and sing and dance as well. You watch elegant couples swirl across beautiful rooms, rooms that never seem to have furniture, only huge sweeping staircases, and servants, dozens of servants.

You enter a movie palace, where the air you breathe is cooled by refrigeration, where the theater owner stages grand giveaways, where your date's heart races to the same dreams of wild love, elegant parties, reckless adventures and happy endings.

When you leave the theater, there's dust in the air and someone is selling apples on the street.

In 1933, Nathanael West will capture a similar moment in his book Miss Lonelyhearts: "He saw a man who appeared to be on the verge of death stagger into a movie theater that was showing a picture called Blonde Beauty. He saw a ragged woman pick a love story magazine out of a garbage can and seem very excited by her find."

We were living on dreams.

The Great Depression

The bottom had dropped out of the stock market in October 1929. In the space of a few weeks $30 billion had disappeared, $30 billion worth of giddy optimism, irrational speculation and greed. At first, some people tried to explain the crash as some kind of Darwinian justice, or as God's wrath in response to avarice. The Crash was simply a correction. Those who were going to jump had already jumped.

The flapper disappeared. Hemlines dropped and the nation adopted a new sobriety. College girls wore conservative clothes, men gave up raccoon coats and rah-rah gestures for traditional Ivy League attire. Economics and politics replaced sex as the topics of late-night bull sessions.

The country and its government seemed to be paralyzed, watching helplessly as banks failed and businesses disappeared. Mortgage lenders foreclosed on farms, houses and dreams. For want of a single payment, the future vanished.

The joyous dance craze of the Twenties turned into a grueling sideshow industry, where couples held each other in monthlong marathons, trying to keep moving in return for free food and the chance to win a prize. In Horace McCoy's dark novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? the dancehall becomes a purgatory of exhausted souls, and one dancer helps his partner commit suicide.

Americans stood in line for food, for the chance of work, for a place to sleep. By 1932, eight million Americans were unemployed--one out of every five persons in the labor force, one out of every seven adults. Sure, there were people whistling Happy Days Are Here Again, but the real anthems were Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and Love for Sale. Scarcity turned sex into a commodity; it destroyed both dignity and desire. Yet even here there was a double standard. We could forgive Gold Diggers, but not beggars.

In the Twenties, couples did not consider marriage until the breadwinner was making $40 per week. In 1933 the average salary was about half that. If statistics can convey the death of romance, consider these: The marriage rate fell from 10.1 per 1000 members of the population in 1929 to 7.9 in 1932. The birthrate fell from 18.9 in 1929 to 16.5 in 1933.

Those who had been America's heroes in 1918 were now the country's outcasts--forgotten men. A ragtag army of World War One veterans gathered in Washington to ask for early payment of a promised war bonus. They erected their own shantytown and called it Hooverville. The president and Congress ignored them until July 28, 1932, when President Herbert Hoover ordered General Douglas Mac-Arthur to send in troops. Saber-wielding cavalry cleared the capital. Yesterday's manhood was not worth the blood in which it had been written.

America became a nation of transients: Almost a million hoboes and hitchhikers roamed the country by 1933, some 200,000 of them adolescents. The women dressed in men's clothing to avoid the kind of trouble their older sisters once sought with reckless abandon.

Poverty laid bare the ugly, brutal demons that lurked at the edge of the American dream. Two observers noted a rebirth of prejudice, a wariness toward outsiders. "Nerves too long frayed by unemployment and the humiliation of relief may again be finding a way to punish one's neighbor for the wrongs one's institutional world has done to one." In desperate times, people took comfort in conformity, an almost superstitious need to huddle together with "people like us"--and to hunt for and persecute scapegoats.

Near Scottsboro, Alabama police arrested nine black youths riding on a freight train after an altercation with white youths. The blacks had thrown the whites off the train.

Searching a boxcar, the police found two white girls. A doctor examined the girls and found traces of semen, but no signs of rape. The prosecution didn't care. As one historian noted, "Rape and rumors of rape became a kind of acceptable folk pornography in the Bible Belt." The girls, perhaps afraid of being arrested for vagrancy or prostitution, cooperated with the prosecution. Outside the courtroom, 10,000 whites gathered to ensure justice. The prosecutor asked the examining physician if the semen he had found belonged to a white man or a black man. In the first trial a state's attorney held up cotton panties and demanded the protection of Southern womanhood. By the fourth trial, the panties had, miraculously, turned to silk.

Eight of the nine defendants were sentenced to death, igniting a national scandal. Although the Supreme Court eventually overturned the convictions, the Scottsboro boys would spend an aggregate of 130 years in jail.

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The signs of crisis were everywhere, but it was not easy to derail a great nation. Those with faith in America--or with enough wealth to live beyond the grasp of the expression--were still building. A group of investors including Pierre Du Pont and Al Smith raised $52 million to construct the Empire State Building, then the tallest in the world. The project took less than a year to complete; 48 workers died in the process, but the finished spire loomed over the city. They called it Al Smith's last erection. An enterprising businessman painted an ad on the roof of a nearby building: buy your furs from fox. The ad would not reach many eyes. Only a quarter of the office space had been rented.

A reporter attending the opening found a crude mural drawn in pencil by one of the workers in an empty loft on the 55th floor: "A towering masculine figure is seen fornicating, Venere aversa, with a stooping female figure who has no arms but pendulous breasts. The man is exclaiming, 'O Man!' Further along is a gigantic vagina with its name in four large letters under it."

At the pinnacle of man's endeavor--pornography, the great equalizer.

The New Deal

In November 1932 the people of America elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide. FDR promised a New Deal and the end of Prohibition. On taking office, the new president told the nation: "This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

FDR gave his blessing to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, an event dedicated to a Century of Progress. A ray of light from the star Arcturus actuated a switch that turned on the lights of the glittering pavilions along the shore of Lake Michigan. More than 22 million visitors came to the fair in its first year, crowding the Hall of Science, the recreation of a Mayan temple and a midget village. But by far the most popular attraction was a blonde fan dancer named Sally Rand. The young woman, who admitted to being (continued on page 136)Hard Times(continued from page 110) destitute until "she took off her pants," danced naked behind ostrich plumes and a giant opaque balloon.

Nudity, it seems, was the symbol of progress. Titillation, the power to divert public attention away from the unthinkable, would become a national resource. (Indeed, FDR's National Recovery Administration went so far as to dictate how many striptease acts could be performed in an evening of burlesque in New York. The figure: four.)

As dust gathered in the wind, as the floodwaters rose, we looked for escape.

America was discovering that poverty had the same power to change sex as prosperity. Where one gave permission, the other created a desperate indifference, or a fear that change might lead to chaos. The battle between the sexes, once fought for equality and respect, now was a struggle for survival.

The End of Prohibition

What had been perceived as a moral crusade and called the Noble Experiment had become a national joke. With FDR came the repeal of Prohibition. The transition from dry to wet was a time of celebration. What had been naughty now bordered on the respectable. The gangsters who had peered through peepholes and listened for passwords now took reservations. Speakeasies became fashionable nightclubs such as the 21, El Morocco, the Cotton Club and the Stork Club. Rumrunners and respectable businessmen built art deco bars and restaurants and Café Society was born. At the Stork Club, a haunt frequented by gangsters and G-men alike, J. Edgar Hoover hung out with Walter Winchell, whose syndicated gossip column and radio broadcasts reached 30 million Americans a week.

Alcohol was no longer government business. If you had a problem with booze, you could join the newly created Alcoholics Anonymous. Former liquor control agents such as Harry Anslinger would have to create a new threat, reefer madness, to stay employed.

The end of Prohibition didn't mean the end of organized crime. The gangsters simply turned to other endeavors, among them extortion, gambling and prostitution. Al "Scarface" Capone took the fall in Chicago on an income tax rap, but Charles "Lucky" Luciano made the Mob in New York into a national syndicate--with himself as the boss of bosses. He seemed beyond the reach of the law, until an enterprising assistant D.A. noticed that all the prostitutes who came through court had the same lawyer, same bail bondsman and same sad story. Investigation revealed an organized sex trade that netted $12 million a year. Luciano allegedly ran more than 200 houses of ill repute, an affront that could not be overlooked. Where the Mafia might adhere to a code of silence, the women they hired did not. One prostitute testified that she had been Luciano's personal property, that she had sat in his bedroom while he organized the prostitution ring, listening to incriminating phone calls between sex acts. Prosecutor Thomas Dewey sent the father of organized crime up the river on a sex charge.

Book Burning

By the Thirties the entire culture had become sexual. An editorial in the November 25, 1931 Nation advised "permitting grown-ups to decide for themselves what books they shall buy, what plays they shall see and even what pictures of undressed females they shall look upon."

It was not to be. In times of economic chaos, the need for control focused on the erotic.

Other nations, facing the same upheaval, viewed sex and sexual expression as the roots of disorder. Hitler's thugs ransacked the Berlin Institute of Sexual Science and destroyed the works of Magnus Hirschfeld. Hitler suppressed Theodoor van De Velde's pioneering sex manual Ideal Marriage--a book that had gone through 42 printings in Germany between 1926 and 1933. On May 10, 1933, 5000 Nazis started a bonfire that would consume a culture. Building a pyre in front of the University of Berlin, students put to the torch volumes by Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger and Sigmund Freud. (Freud dwelt on "the animal qualities of human nature," cried one of the book burners.)

In Purity in Print, Paul Boyer tells how a Nazi historian justified the purge: "The fire is to us the sign and symbol of an inflexible will to purity. The nests of corruption shall be destroyed and the haunts of degeneration purified. Youth, prizing its human dignity, presses forward to the light, to the sun. O thou eternal longing of the soul to be free from degrading smut and trash!"

America looked at those flames and recoiled. More than 100,000 people in New York City and 50,000 in Chicago marched in protest of the Nazi book burnings.

John Sumner, who had inherited Anthony Comstock's New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, quietly removed the group's symbol--a top-hatted gentleman tossing a pile of books onto a bonfire--from the annual report. Sumner began to withdraw from the censorship crusade, noting that perhaps Comstock had been "somewhat of a religious fanatic who also loved notoriety."

Not everyone in America was opposed to censorship. There were those who heard the phrase "banned in Boston" and felt civic pride. Bluenoses in New England blacklisted Boccaccio's Decameron, Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, while Detroit censors protected citizens from Casanova's Mémoires and Hemingway's To Have and Have Not.

In 1930 Congress had passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. A last-minute amendment gave U.S. Customs the power to ban obscene books or items. Senator Reed Smoot, like Comstock before him, had thrown a "senatorial stag party." Legislators leered over contraband copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the Kama Sutra and Frank Harris' My Life and Loves. Lust was a foreign product, a foreign idea that should be kept from American shores. Apparently, there's nothing like sex to obscure a lawmaker's memory of the Bill of Rights. (The nonsexual parts of the Smoot-Hawley bill, intended to ease the effects of the Depression, actually cost the nation nearly $2 billion a month in lost trade opportunities, and was generally credited with contributing to the economic chaos that led to World War Two.)

In the same year that the Nazis burned books, Morris Ernst, the general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, defied U.S. Customs by trying to bring a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses into the country. In December 1933 Judge John Munro Woolsey ruled that the book did not "stir the sex impulses." Nowhere could he find "the leer of the sensualist." Within weeks, 33,000 Americans bought--and were baffled by--Joyce's literary lust.

U.S. Customs did not readily relinquish its role as guardian of American morals, however. In 1934 it would ban Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a ribald description of the writer's life in Paris. (continued on page 142)Hard Times(continued from page 136)

While Customs seemed obsessed with controlling foreign ideas about sex, it let foreign ideas about censorship pass. The increasing influx of immigrants had introduced a Roman Catholic model into moral intervention. While Puritans relied on government and vigilante vice groups for repression, the Catholics looked to the Vatican. For centuries, the Catholic Church had published the Index Librorum Prohibitorum--a list of banned publications. The Church not only burned books. It had, on occasion, burned authors. Churchgoers who sampled prohibited literature faced a different kind of fire.

Catholics believed in a single infallible authority, while among Protestants "every man was his own priest." The Catholics were not only better organized than the Protestants, they also ran the political machines and law enforcement in many of the nation's major cities. When "the agents of gang religion" tried to dictate the tastes of Americans, the results would be felt for decades.

The Code

From the outset, Hollywood had been plagued by freelance censors. It seemed that every city and township had a scissors-wielding crusader. Following the Fatty Arbuckle scandal in 1921, studios confronted almost 40 separate state bills calling for film censorship. They had responded by forming the Hays Office. The industry would regulate itself according to a set of guidelines known as "the Don'ts and the Be Carefuls."

The Hays Office may have placated the Protestants; the Catholics had other ideas. George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, Martin Quigley (publisher of the Motion Picture Herald), Joseph Breen (a Catholic reporter and PR flack) and two Jesuits, Fathers Daniel Lord and Fitzgeorge Dinneen--all connected to the Archdiocese of Chicago--felt that the Hays Office guidelines had become a travesty and that Will Hays himself had become a studio stooge. Quigley and company drafted a model of the "Cardinal's Code"--what became the Motion Picture Production Code in March 1930.

Under the rubric of General Principles, the Code declared: "No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

"Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation."

The Production Code prohibited scenes that made adultery or illicit sex seem attractive. (One critic wondered how the studios hoped to accomplish this goal. Did it mean that one had to show ugly mistresses?)

Directors could not indulge in scenes of gratuitous passion: Ardor could appear only when essential to the plot. (But the very nature of passion is that it is unexpected, that it leads only to romance and not to, say, the discovery of radio waves or a new planet.)

The Code was against "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces and suggestive postures or gestures." As Gene Fowler, a Hollywood humorist, wrote, "Will Hays is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in clean postures."

If a plot demanded passion, then directors were to show it so as "not to stimulate the lower and baser emotions." Or as Fowler noted: "Thou shalt not photograph the wiggling belly, the gleaming thigh or the winkling navel, especially to music, as goings-on of this ilk sorely troubleth the little boys of our land and so crammeth the theater with adolescence that papa cannot find a seat."

The Code prohibited treatment of rape, seduction, sexual perversion, white slavery, sex relationships between whites and blacks, scenes of childbirth and the filming of a child's sex organs. Nudity was out of the question.

Hays and the Hollywood moguls saw the Code as a means of fending off real censorship. What did they know?

Lights, Camera, Action

During the first years of the Depression moviegoers vanished. Almost 90 million viewers had flocked to dream palaces weekly in 1930: By the end of 1931 the figure was 60 million. Father Daniel Lord, trying to justify the Production Code, blamed the downturn on "too much sex" in the movies.

Hollywood looked at the figures and came to the opposite conclusion. As the Depression deepened, directors by and large ignored the Code. Studios on the edge of bankruptcy released increasingly explicit films. Marlene Dietrich, dressed in a man's tuxedo, kisses a woman to get Gary Cooper's attention in Morocco (1930). Joan Crawford plays a prostitute led astray by a preacher in Rain (1932). Jean Harlow uses sex as a passport to success in Red Headed Woman (1932). Barbara Stanwyck does the same in Baby Face (1933), sleeping her way to the top of the corporate ladder. With titles such as Illicit, Sinner's Holiday, Confessions of a Coed, Forbidden and Skyscraper Souls, the movie studios pushed the limits of propriety. There was even a version of William Faulkner's controversial novel Sanctuary--a story that featured the raping of a woman with a corncob.

Even musicals ignored the Code. In 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade, Busby Berkeley transformed near-naked chorines into kaleidoscopic erotic fantasies and Freudian fountains. In one scene, he turned women into musical instruments, prompting a mother to protest: "I did not raise my daughter to be a human harp."

Sign of the Cross

Frank Walsh, author of Sin and Censorship, believes that one movie "played a significant role" in triggering the subsequent Catholic crusade. In 1932 director Cecil B. De Mille, flouting the Code, released a film that combined "sex, nudity, arson, homosexuality, lesbianism, mass murder and orgies."

The Sign of the Cross was spectacular. It followed Hollywood's old trademark formula of six reels of sin, one reel of condemnation, opening with the burning of Rome, followed by Claudette Colbert, playing the Empress Poppaea, breast deep in a milk bath. A beautiful body, glistening, always on the edge of exposure--it held the nation's attention.

The film pitted the Christian virgin Mercia, a model of purity, against all the vices of pagan Rome. It culminates in an afternoon of Roman programming: See a naked slave tethered to a stake as a love morsel for a crazed gorilla. Witness a woman clad in only a garland of flowers be suspended between two stakes while crocodiles advance. Watch elephants crush the skulls of true believers, Amazons spike Pygmies on spears, gladiators slaughter slaves. See lions feast on Christians!

In one powerful scene a Christian martyr carries a child into the arena, hiding the girl's face beneath his cloak so she will not see the slaughter. Father Lord and the others wanted to draw a cloak over the eyes of all Americans.

Realizing that the Code would not be enforced unless there was pressure from outside the industry, supporters began to organize, reaching out to other influential Catholics. In October 1933 the group persuaded Monsignor Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, the newly appointed apostolic delegate from Rome, to endorse a crusade: "Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the bishops and the priests to a united and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals."

In response, the American bishops appointed a committee to organize what would become known as the Legion of Decency.

Between seven million and nine million Catholics took a pledge: "I condemn indecent and immoral pictures and those which glorify crime or criminals. I promise to do all that I can to strengthen public opinion against the production of indecent and immoral films and to unite with all those who protest them. I acknowledge my obligation to form a right conscience about pictures that are dangerous to my moral life. As a member of the Legion of Decency I pledge myself to remain away from them. I promise, further, to stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy."

"Purify Hollywood or destroy Hollywood" became the anthem of the new crusade. A Buffalo priest came up with a new catechism: M=moral menace, O=obscenity, V=vulgarity, I=immorality, E=exposure, S=sex. Bishops and priests produced lists of blacklisted films, often in conflict with one another.

Film historian Gregory Black says: "The Catholic periodical Extension Magazine told readers that movies were 'an occasion of sin.' If Catholics knowingly went to a movie that the church had declared 'immoral,' they had committed a mortal sin.

"A mortal sin was considered a major breach of Catholic dogma, and if not forgiven through confession and serious penance, would result in eternal damnation. Suddenly, Catholics faced the prospect of eternal damnation for going to the wrong movie!"

In September 1934 some 70,000 students took to the streets of Chicago not to protest book burning in Germany, but to declare a new war. They carried placards that read: An Admission to an Indecent Movie is an Admission Ticket to Hell.

Pass the popcorn.

The Hollywood Hitler

It was not enough to pledge fidelity to a Catholic approved Production Code. The Code required an enforcer.

In 1932 Joe Breen, who had joined the Hays Office as a special assistant to the president, wrote to Father Wilfrid Parsons, an influential Jesuit, complaining that Hollywood Jews would never honor the Code:

"They are simply a rotten bunch of vile people with no respect for anything beyond the making of money. Here in Hollywood we have paganism rampant and in its most virulent form. Drunkenness and debauchery are commonplace. Sexual perversion is rampant. Any number of our directors and stars are perverts. These Jews seem to think of nothing but moneymaking and sexual indulgence. The vilest kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be. They and they alone make the decision. Ninety-five percent of these folks are Jews of an eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth."

In a meeting with studio heads, Joseph Scott, a Catholic lawyer invited by Breen and Los Angeles' Bishop Cantwell, called the Jews "disloyal" Americans, engaged in "a conspiracy to debauch the youth of the land." Scott reminded the producers that there were groups in America "sympathetic with the Nazi assaults on Jews in Germany and were even now organizing further to attack the Jew in America."

Catholics represented one third of the movie audience in major cities. A boycott would have killed the industry. Hollywood capitulated: Hays hired Breen to enforce the Production Code. Between 1936 and 1939 Breen's office handed down 26,808 opinions interpreting the Code.

In the gospel according to Breen, the sophisticated married couple Nick and Nora Charles slept in twin beds throughout the half a dozen Thin Man films. No women appeared pregnant on-screen. No bathroom had a toilet. And Betty Boop gave up her garter.

Under the Production Code the average length of a screen kiss dropped from 72 inches of film (about four seconds) to 18 inches (or 1.5 seconds). Nudity disappeared. Troubled by the trailer for Tarzan and His Mate that showed Jane swimming naked with Johnny Weissmuller, Breen demanded that the scene be cut from the finished movie. He also insisted on less revealing attire for the jungle couple. In a scene where Tarzan drags Jane into their treetop abode, Breen ordered cut the sound of Jane's contented laughter.

In another film, he objected to the look of expectation on a bride's face as she climbed into bed with her husband on a Pullman train. You could not show sexual pleasure, and you could not show the anticipation of sexual pleasure either. The Code insisted that great care be taken when filming in bedrooms because "certain places are so closely and thoroughly associated with sexual life and with sexual sin that their use must be carefully limited." According to some scholars, the Code changed the nature of lovemaking, creating an unlikely Kama Sutra where couples on a couch or bed had to keep one foot on the floor.

Breen censored references to abortion, breast-feeding, pregnancy and childbirth. Children fell from the sky (literally, when Boy was added to the cast of Tarzan). A highly acclaimed educational film titled The Birth of a Baby, which showed scenes of childbirth, was denied approval. The subject was "sacred."

Breen inflicted the standards of the Victorian era on movie dialogue. One could not utter the words nerts, nuts, cripes, fanny, Gawd, hell or hold your hat. You could not call a woman an alley cat, a bat, a broad, a chippie, a tart, a slut or a madam. Go figure.

According to Frank Walsh, Joe Breen seemed obsessed with "the intimate behavior of barnyard animals." "At no time," opined a member of Breen's staff, "should there be any shots of actual milking, and there cannot be any showing of the udders of the cow." The Code could not tolerate King Kong's lust for Fay Wray--cutting scenes that showed Kong peeling off the dress from the writhing sacrificial victim. (It was Breen, not Beauty, who killed the Beast.) If he did not get a film on its debut, he cut it on its rerelease. By the next decade, such sexually aggressive monsters as Frankenstein and Dracula had been reduced to straight men for Abbott and Costello.

As for relations between humans, the battles over the filming of Gone With the Wind were impressive. Breen's office shortened a shot of Scarlett O'Hara licking her chops after the night Rhett Butler carried her up the stairs. The censors requested that Rhett's parting shot be changed to "Frankly, my dear, I just don't care." More than two million people had read the novel without Western civilization being plunged into depravity. Producer David O. Selznick refused to change the line.

The censor's control reached beyond the cutting room. Hollywood studio heads went out of their way to police the private lives of actors and actresses. The fan magazines and gossip columnists played along. The public never learned that Loretta Young had Clark Gable's baby after co-starring in The Call of the Wild. Or that Marlene Dietrich was a switch-hitter. Or that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott shared a beach house until the studio objected. The dateline on stories about the industry no longer read Hollywood Babylon--it was Any-town, U.S.A.

Mae West

Into this nest of repression waltzed Mae West. She arrived in Hollywood in 1932, a 39-year-old veteran of Broadway, a woman in complete control of her public persona. West had already done what no Hollywood actor, actress, writer or producer had done before. She had gone to jail for what she had to say about sex. West was arrested in 1927 during a crackdown ordered by Joseph McKee, acting mayor of New York City. West's raucous Sex had already played 375 performances on the Great White Way. West spent eight days in jail, then returned with an equally rowdy, even more successful play called Diamond Lil.

While Paramount tried to figure out a way to get a script of Diamond Lil past the Hays Office, it gave West a small part in Night After Night, a George Raft movie.

Writing her own lines for what amounted to little more than a cameo appearance, she stole the picture. West's first scene is a classic moment with a hatcheck girl who exclaims: "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds." To which West replies, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie."

The exchange set the tone for West's characters in all the films that followed. She was constantly setting the world straight.

The Hays Office might change the title of Diamond Lil (to She Done Him Wrong) and make the story incomprehensible, but nothing could restrain Mae. She had her own view of men, telling a young woman who had fallen on hard times: "Men's all alike, married or single. It's their game. I happen to be smart enough to play it their way."

"Who'd want me," sobs the girl, "after what I've done?"

Mae reassures her: "When women go wrong, men go right after them."

In She Done Him Wrong, West, playing a singer in a saloon, pursues Cary Grant: "Why don't you come up sometime, see me? Come up, I'll tell your fortune." When Grant hesitates, she delivers the line that gets the laugh: "Aw, you can be had."

One of West's sultriest moments came when she took the stage to sing A Guy What Takes His Time, a candid celebration of foreplay. Censors in New York, Ohio, Maryland, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania excised the song. The Hays Office, trying to salvage its reputation, cut the scene to an opening and closing verse, leaving a visible scar on the film.

Paramount teamed West and Grant in a second film, I'm No Angel. Her slow shimmy during Sister Honky-Tonk, shot largely off or below camera, was as knowing a sexual dance as was ever performed on film.

The film is filled with classic one-liners. After a lawyer in a breach of promise suit tries to establish her promiscuity, West purrs, "It's not the men in your life. It's the life in your men."

Representing herself, she cruises past the jury box with the aside, "How am I doing, hmm?"

West played for the real jury--her audience. More than 46 million Americans saw the two films. She proved that sex sells, single-handedly bringing Paramount back from the edge of bankruptcy. But, facing pressure from the Legion of Decency, Mae's early films were removed from circulation. With the arrival of Joe Breen, each successive film was subject to increased scrutiny. Reviewing the script for Klondike Annie, Breen objected to the presence of a Bible in a scene with West. He ordered the book's tide changed to Settlement Maxims.

Controversy followed West to radio. She appeared on the Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy show:

Mae: "You're all wood and a yard long."

Charlie: "Yeah.

"Mae: "You weren't so nervous and backward when you came up to see me at my apartment. In fact, you didn't need any encouragement to kiss me."

Charlie: "Did I do that?"

Mae: "Why, you certainly did. I got the marks to prove it. And splinters too."

In June 1934 Congress created a Federal Communications Commission to monitor the radio industry. Frank Mc-Ninch, newly appointed commissioner, claimed West's performance with Charlie McCarthy justified government control to ensure "against features that are suggestive, vulgar, immoral or of such character as may be offensive to the great mass of right thinking, clean-minded American citizens."

The FCC would henceforth patrol indecency on the air--and if a station didn't agree, it would lose its license. After her exchange with Charlie, the mere mention of Mae West's name was banned on 130 stations.

Whatever else, Mae West proved the critics right. She confessed that the danger lay not in what she said but in how she said it. Between the talkies and radio, America had discovered how to listen for sexual innuendo. A single woman, narrating her own erotic script, inspired millions for the rest of the century. She was unafraid. She was funny. Newspapers celebrated her measurements (36-26-36) as a healthy return to lush womanhood, not realizing that Mae wore the turn-of-the-century corset as a kind of defiant joke.

When aviators donned an inflatable life vest in World War Two, they called it a Mae West.

The Golden Age of Cinema

Breen and supporters of the Code claimed their efforts were responsible for the golden age of cinema. Even today proponents of censorship, rating systems and family values point to the films of the Thirties as proof that imposing controls over art can be beneficial. It's not that simple. Cutting a line here, a scene there, could not diminish either the excellence of many of the films or the basic sex appeal of Hollywood stars.

What the censors could not control was intangible, however. René Jordan, a biographer, simply notes that Clark Gable had machismo: "There was a constant aura of sex about him, and the plots of his movies often suggested that a night with Gable was a very special experience for the girl involved. The screen Gable insinuated he had a power to give orgasms, even to a generation of women who still were not too sure whether they were supposed to have them."

The Code could not repress attitude, beauty or pure animal magnetism. It could place its seal of approval on polite films and send the rest to the B circuit. Life as depicted in post-Code movies reminds one of Henry James' assessment of proper Americans at the turn of the century--all dressed up and with nowhere to go.

Ecstasy and Exploitation

In 1933 Ecstasy, a distinctly non-Code foreign film, introduced an unknown teenage actress named Hedwig Kiesler to the world. The film presents the sexual awakening of a young woman trapped in a love-starved marriage. She swims naked in a pond, then runs unclothed through the woods as her horse gallops off with her clothes. But the most naked moment of the film is the shot of her face as she experiences sexual fulfillment for the first time.

In 1935 the Treasury Department confiscated the film. (Were they worried it was a counterfeit orgasm?) An appeals court judge upheld the ban, saying that the film was a "glorification of sexual intercourse."

Damn right it was.

The young actress married an Austrian munitions maker who tried to buy and destroy all the prints of the film, but Ecstasy would make the rounds of "adults only" art houses for decades, playing at more than 400 theaters during the next 20 years. Changing her name to Hedy Lamarr, the actress went to Hollywood and became a star.

Just as Prohibition had produced a demand for bootleggers and speakeasies, the Code's film prohibitions created a market for low-budget exploitation films. A group of independents known as the Forty Thieves produced and distributed features across the country on what was known as the grindhouse circuit. Grindhouse films dealt with subjects forbidden by the Code, including sex, nudity, venereal disease, drugs and prostitution, and had titles like Fools of Desire, The Road to Ruin, Reefer Madness and The Cocaine Fiends. Theaters, trying to escape local censorship, advertised them as "adults only" films. The ads were a con--many of the Forty Thieves came out of carnival backgrounds and, like sideshow barkers, knew how to hawk their wares.

The films they showed were tawdry little dramas--the natural descendants of1913's Traffic in Souls (a film that showed the horrors of the supposed white slave trade). Americans could learn how cocaine led to prostitution in Girls of the Street--producing in women the mad desire to stand around in lingerie. The titillation was cloaked as cautionary moral tales: The Vice Rackets showed "Scarlet Girls Chained to the Vultures of Vice," Mad Youth guided teenagers through the "Pitfalls of this Streamlined Age," Secrets of a Model asked, "Can a beautiful model stay pure?" Films called Goona-Goonas showed naked natives in their natural habitats: Nonwhite races were allowed to display bare breasts and raw passion, the virtue of being pagan primitives. Even Hollywood had learned from National Geographic.

The Forty Thieves took the sex hygiene film Damaged Goods and repackaged it as Forbidden Desires. The genre associated sex with sleaze, sex with shame, sex with horrible consequence, sex with fear. Anthony Comstock could not have asked for more.

Sex was relegated to specific locations in the city. In 1937 Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York, closed the burlesque houses in Times Square. The theaters became grindhouses, projecting sexploitation flicks where the Minsky brothers had once staged the best bawdy shows in town.

Stag Films

The Depression did not deter the lone entrepreneur, his trunk filled with stag films, driving around the country to show A Stiff Game, Matinee Idol, Buried Treasure, Hycock's Dancing School, Mexican Dog and Unexpected Company to lodges, veterans' and fraternal organizations, at bachelor parties and smokers. Although forbidden by law, the films played to the community's most upstanding citizens, all male. That's why they were called stag films. The hard-core pornography of the Thirties presented an unending line of traveling salesmen, icemen, repairmen, handymen, milkmen and grocery boys visiting lonely, frustrated women in their homes. Even physicians made house calls to administer Dr. Hardon's Injections--though office visits to doctors and dentists led to the same end. In these male fantasies, every man had a job.

Fellatio could be found in almost half the films, but barely one in ten showed cunnilingus. Lesbian action was commonplace, but male homosexuality was virtually nonexistent. (Bestiality was actually more common than male homosexuality.) The commercial stag film market reflected the predilections and prejudices of its all-male, middle-class, heterosexual audience.

During the Thirties, New York City launched a major antiprostitution crusade. Polly Adler, girlfriend of gangsters and madam extraordinaire, was arrested--not for running a house of prostitution but for possessing stag films. Even brothels had become movie houses. Stag films were just another avenue of escape.

Sex at The Newsstand

The censors had cleaned up Hollywood, but there was still plenty of titillation to be found at the corner newsstand. Alongside the pulps, with their usual array of ladies in lingerie, a new kind of men's magazine went on sale in the fall of 1933.

Esquire featured articles on male fashion, fiction by Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, racy cartoons and the Petty Girl. George Petty created an airbrushed beauty who was soon famous. She was a sexually liberated lady who reflected the Sugar Daddy-Gold Digger mentality of the magazine. The Petty Girl was always talking on the telephone and was refreshingly candid in her conversations, as reflected in this caption: "Western Union? Send me a boy--a big boy." By the end of the decade she had graduated to gatefold status; Life magazine would call her the "feminine ideal of American men."

Henry Luce launched Life in 1936, using something he called photojournalism to open a window to the world. Life depicted the depth of the Depression as well as the high jinks of Café Society. "Life Goes to a Party" was one of its most popular features.

Life reflected middle-class, mainstream sensibilities, but it wasn't above printing a provocative pictorial from time to time. It ran a frivolous feature on "How a Wife Should Undress" in 1937, but it was a serious story on the film The Birth of a Baby the following year that gave Life its first censorship problems. The issue was banned in more than 50 localities, including Boston (of course), Brooklyn, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, Savannah, Tucson, all of Pennsylvania and Canada. During the Depression, we didn't even want to know where babies came from.

The Comics

If the birth of a baby was a problem, that didn't mean there wasn't titillation to be found, even in the funny papers. There were enough buxom beauties in the comics to satisfy the yearnings of the most precocious adolescent: We had Burma and the Dragon Lady in Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates, plus Daisy Mae, Moonbeam McSwine and Stupe-fyin' Jones in Al Capp's Li'l Abner. And, of course, there was Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon. What made Flash Gordon especially exciting, in addition to the wonderful adventures, was the fact that women didn't wear much clothing on Mongo. No wonder Ming the Merciless had the hots for Dale Arden. She was always getting into some sort of trouble and having her clothes torn off.

The Depression had also sparked a phenomenon unprecedented in American pop culture. Almost overnight, eight-page sexual parodies of comic strips appeared, depicting the secret lives of familiar friends. The same characters who made families laugh over the breakfast table ripped off their clothes and plunged into one another with reckless abandon. Harold Teen and Lillums, Dagwood and Blondie, Moon Mullins, Maggie and Jiggs, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse--all were revealed as sexual creatures with preposterous appetites. Betty Boop took on Barney Google, Jiggs, Popeye, Moon Mullins and Joe Palooka within one eight-page book.

In the eight-pagers no one was too good for sex: Clark Gable did Joan Crawford, William Powell did Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire did Ginger Rogers and Mae West did everybody. In Europe porn lampooned the ruling class, priests and nuns. In America porn had fun with our own aristocracy: movie stars and outlaws such as John Dillinger and Al Capone.

Also known as Tijuana bibles, the eight-pagers depicted sex as the common denominator, the great equalizer--at a time when people were anything but equal. The bibles appeared with the Depression, then, inexplicably, began to disappear with the economic recovery of the following decade.

The Electronic Fire

Americans sat huddled around the radio. FDR calmed the nation with fireside chats, eloquent appeals to basic values in a time of strife. People stayed at home to listen to Amos 'n' Andy. (Only on radio could two white guys pass themselves off as enterprising Negroes.) The whole family gathered to listen to Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Major Bowes and His Original Amateur Hour, The Lux Radio Theater and One Man's Family. Children had Little Orphan Annie, Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy, The Lone Ranger and The Shadow. Women followed soap operas such as Oxydol's Own Ma Perkins, Our Gal Sunday and Backstage Wife, with Mary Noble. Men listened to sportscaster Bill Stern, Gang-busters and Arch Oboler's chilling Lights Out. The average family spent four and a half hours a day listening to the radio. The glowing tubes brought comfort. In one sense, the radio re-created the parlor and front porch of Victorian times.

Bing Crosby was the most popular crooner of the decade. We listened to Eddie Cantor's Camel Caravan and Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade. And every night there were big band remotes from nightclubs, hotels and ballrooms across the country with Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. Goodman was the "King of Swing," and swing was the thing. The Lindy Hop replaced the Charleston, and those who dug the jive and could cut a rug were called jitterbugs.

Martin Bloch's Make Believe Ballroom played the most popular records of the day, but network censors wouldn't give Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit airplay because it was a powerful indictment of savage Southern lynchings. Radio of-.fered a make-believe world that fostered innocence and isolationism. Too many Americans didn't want to know what was going on in the rest of the world.

When Orson Welles broadcast War of the Worlds on the night before Halloween in 1938, thousands of Americans actually believed we were being attacked by Martians and took to the streets in panic.

Andy Hardy High

Actually, America did have a new species of life to worry about--the teenager. Grace Palladino, author of Teenagers: An American History, notes that "up until the Thirties, most teenagers worked for a living on farms, in factories or at home, whatever their families required at the time. They were not considered teenagers then, or even adolescents. The Great Depression finally pushed teenage youth out of the workplace and into the classroom. By 1936, 65 percent were high school students, the highest proportion to date."

This would have an unusual impact on America: "When a teenage majority spent the better part of their day in high school, they learned to look to one another and not to adults for advice, information and approval. And when they got a glimpse of the freedom and social life that the high school crowd enjoyed, they revolutionized the concept of growing up."

Hollywood was the first to recognize teenagers. When a comedy about a small town judge and his family proved an unexpected success, Louis B. Mayer had one of the most successful film series in history on his hands. Andy Hardy came of age in 15 films.

The story lines usually showed Judge Hardy dealing with the problems of the town of Carvel--telling a man that it was not a legal matter that he had been caught kissing in a parked car, it was more a matter of taste. Telling a woman that it was not her right to buy on installment if it meant that the store would garnishee her husband's wages.

In "man-to-man" talks Lewis Stone would try to steer Mickey Rooney toward the proper choices. What makes you feel better, he'd ask, dating a girl who resists kissing or a girl who only wants to kiss?

The films showed the evolution of sexual barter, the politics of popularity. Andy tries to raise $20 to buy a roadster in time for the Christmas dance. Such a car, he explains to Judy Garland, creates a standard, a pressure to perform. "The girl I take to the dance has got to be sensational." Should she be able to dance? asks Garland. "Even if she dances like a horse," responds Andy, "it's an awful long ride home in the dark."

In real life Mickey Rooney had a much more interesting sex life than did his onscreen persona. He had worked as a child actor before getting his big break playing the younger version of Clark Gable's gangster in Manhattan Melodrama. The highest-paid teenager in the land loved his celebrity. Phil Silvers, Sidney Miller, Jackie Cooper and Rooney used to hang out together. One day, Silvers suggested they call out for a hooker. Waiting for her arrival, the boys made a bet. Whoever lasted longest would get a free ride.

The girl arrived and went into the bedroom. One after another, Miller, Silvers and Cooper went in--and each emerged in three minutes flat. Rooney went in last. Twenty minutes passed; the three outside heard all sorts of assorted shrieks. Rooney finally emerged, acknowledged his victory and left. When the hooker came out, Silvers asked, "Was Mickey really in the saddle 20 minutes?"

"Are you kidding? Four minutes of fucking and 16 minutes of imitations."

Rooney was famous for his impersonations of Gable, Lionel Barrymore, even Mae West--and like many another youth in America, he tried to entertain his bedmates with the best lines and moves of his Hollywood heroes.

•

What was life like in actual American high schools? Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd returned to Muncie, Indiana to follow up their classic Middletown. The two reported: "A symptom of this pressure of a blank future on the very youngest marriageable group, children 18 and under, is the rise in secret marriages among the high school population. This situation has doubtless been influenced by the growing restlessness of the younger generation and by the relaxation of discipline and lessened contact with their children by harried working-class parents. But it may also reflect in part the tendency of more reckless couples to plunge ahead in quest of the one thing two people can achieve together even in the face of a blind future--personal intimacy."

What the Lynds called secret marriage would later become known as "going steady." Romance, not reality, gave permission for sexual experimentation.

The Lynds noted that there was a sharp demarcation between Muncie's adolescents and its adults. The former displayed a "sense of sharp, free behavior between themselves (patterned on the movies)."

The adult posture on the subject of sex was strict silence.

"The truth of the matter," reported the Lynds, "appears to be that God-fearing Middletown is afraid of sex as a force in its midst, afraid it might break loose and run wild."

A newspaper editorial raised the alarm that sex was rampant in the eighth grade. The writer recommended a quick application of old-fashioned values--the paddle.

High schoolers asked teachers questions they had never before been asked. "Our high school does nothing about sex education," said one teacher, "because we don't dare to." When a local librarian was asked where people could learn about sex, her reply was, "Not here."

Sex Education

Whereas a few decades earlier the sex manuals available to youth focused on the dangers of masturbation, Thirties manuals found a new source of self-destruction: petting.

In a twisted volume called So Youth May Know: New Viewpoints on Sex and Love, Roy Dickerson wrote a chapter on the value of abstinence over promiscuity: "At the very outset it must be said that it would be indeed ultrapuritanical and ill-advised to denounce altogether all the ordinary minor, more or less incidental and chiefly matter-of-fact physical contacts between the sexes."

Having said that, he can't resist expressing the notion that sex is something so abhorrent, you should save it for someone you love. (Although how the act that was supposedly so corrupt could suddenly become the cement of a strong marriage was never explained.)

These books enforced the double standard and called into question a youth's right to act on his or her own desires: "The first woman a man thinks of for a petting party is not often the first one he thinks of for a wife. She may be all right for his good times, but ordinarily he does not want secondhand goods or a woman who has been freely pawed over for a sweetheart, wife and mother of his children." The boy who thinks it is smart to mess around with girls, who, to be plainspoken, has intercourse first with one and then another girl, may very seriously affect his thinking and feelings about girls. He may never become able to be genuinely and permanently interested in any one girl.

As for a girl being interested in you, beware: "If they go out with you, they go out with others and you are not safe."

Dickerson borrowed all the clichés of the antimasturbation books to douse youthful desire: Keep busy. Leave alcohol strictly alone. Do not dally with your sex desires. Give up those pictures, books, plays, conversations or forms of dancing and the like that arouse you. Pray. Keep your bowels open. Dismiss unwelcome sexual thoughts. If you find yourself cursed with an erection, try brisk exercise. Shadowbox. Walk about rapidly. Remember that kissing transmits syphilis.

Dickerson had less to say to young women. Indeed, he neglected to include the clitoris in the diagram of the female sex organs that appears in the appendix, lest women discover for themselves that sex could be pleasurable.

The Battle of The Sexes

When Robert and Helen Lynd returned to Indiana to study the effects of the Depression on Muncie, they found that people believed in strict sex roles. In the Twenties a new woman emerged, but no new man. Forget women's liberation, forget the flapper. Experimentation was a fringe benefit of prosperity. Scarcity created an almost superstitious faith in "the old ways." The people of Muncie believed "that men should behave like men, and women like women."

The Depression made that dream impossible for millions of American men: A man who could not support his family had no claim to manhood. In contrast, the Depression did little to change gender roles for women, who were still expected to care for the family at home. In fact, some cities passed laws that prevented married women from working.

We were no longer certain what it meant to be a man. Who were the proper role models? The movies offered enviable examples in the macho images of Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn. James Cagney knew his way around a dame and made a great gangster, but even with Jean Harlow as incentive, crime was not considered a great career move. The women were as tough as the times required and, as one of the Gold Diggers of 1933 remarked, "had done things I wouldn't want on my conscience."

The battle between the sexes made for great comedy in films such as One Hour With You, It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby. But the biggest box office star of the Thirties was Shirley Temple, and when Graham Greene referred to the "dimpled depravity" of her cozy relationships with the older men in her films, her studio sued for libel.

The Depression precipitated new concerns over sexual identity and, in 1936, Lewis Terman (creator of the IQ test) and Catherine Miles developed a 456-item test that promised to determine a child's masculine or feminine nature. Junior high school students answered word association tests: If "pure" made you think of milk, you were masculine; if it made you think of good, you were feminine. If "train" led to engine, you were manly; if it led to gown, you were womanly. If you selected lover or sin after reading the word embrace, you were masculine; if you thought of your mother or arms, less so. Boys went from "knight" to armor or man, while the feminine went from "knight" to Ivanhoe. And, if you were masculine, the only correct association for "machine" was Ford--not engine, not ride and certainly not sew.

In the Rorschach section of the test, men faced with two concentric circles were supposed to see a target, women a dish. That slinky thing, wider at one end than the other, was to the masculine eye a saxophone, to the feminine a snake.

Masculinity could be measured by what you knew ("the Yale is a kind of lock") and things you did not know. One received points toward masculinity by neglecting to complete sentences such as "A loom is used for ..." or "Daffodils are grown from ..."or "The Madonna is a favorite subject for...."

Those who were measurably masculine wanted to become detectives, auto racers, forest rangers, soldiers, draftsmen and stock breeders. They did not want to become journalists, novelists or preachers. If you had to be a journalist, then you would like to write about accidents and sporting news, as opposed to musical events or theatrical news. Those with a feminine streak yearned to become librarians, nurses, private secretaries, social workers and music teachers.

The masculine were known by the books they had read and liked (Huckleberry Finn, Gulliver's Travels, Biography of a Grizzly or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) as well as by the books they had not read. (You scored a manly point for not having an opinion about Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter Pan or Through the Looking Glass).

No masculine guy kept a diary. A true man disliked taking baths and did not believe there should be perfect equality between men and women in all things.

Feminine types were inclined to believe that "girls are naturally more innocent than boys." Yet males, not females, believed that "love at first sight is usually the truest love."

To the modern eye it is clear that Terman and Miles had a bias the size of biceps. And nowhere on the scale did a question reveal how a masculine or feminine character would behave in the bedroom. The test harked back to the days when masculine was synonymous with Christian gentleman (the kind of man who was an "athlete of continence") and when feminine was synonymous with virgin or mother, when all that was feminine was enshrined in the domestic world.

Economic insecurities created new sexual anxieties. The liberal attitudes of the Twenties and early Thirties disappeared. The nation was caught up in a panic over homosexuality. Boys who scored too highly on the feminine side of Terman's scale were given healthy doses of exercise and outdoor activity. At least one doctor in Georgia used electroshock therapy to treat those suspected of being homosexual.

Science offered a solution, finally identifying and describing the role of hormones in the development of sex differences. Fred Koch, a biologist at the University of Chicago, found that if he ground up bull testicles and injected capons with the extract, the birds grew an "upstanding red comb." Men started taking extracts of ram testicles and considered animal gonad transplants in a vain effort to gain virility.

One catches glimpses of what we now call sexual inadequacy and performance anxiety. Freud had introduced the idea of penis envy--declaring that women had it (because they didn't have one) and that explained everything.

Edmund Wilson records an encounter between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in which Fitzgerald wondered if his penis was too small. Hemingway offered Fitzgerald this solace: It only seemed too small because he looked at it from above. "You have to look at it in a mirror," said Hemingway.

The Pursuit of Sexual Happiness

People turned to sex as the one part of the world they could still control, that could still ensure happiness. It was the one green spot in a world of dust. The most popular sex manual of the day described simultaneous orgasm as the perfect solution to the battle between the sexes. But there was a great gulf between theory and practice.

In 1938 Terman moved from the study of sex differences--what it meant to be masculine and feminine--to the psychological factors of marital happiness. In a groundbreaking study, he delved into the intimate lives of 792 couples.

He found a dramatic trend away from virginity. Half of the men born before 1890 had been virgins when they married, while only 14 percent of those born after 1910 had been virgins. A similar decline had occurred in the women: Of those born before 1890, 87 percent had been virgins when they married; of those born after 1910, less than a third were virgins.

Terman was one of the first scientists to use his data to predict the future of sex: "If the drop should continue at the average rate shown," he wrote, "virginity at marriage will be close to the vanishing point for males born after 1930 and for females born after 1940. It will be of no small interest to see how long the cultural ideal of virgin marriage will survive as a moral code after its observance has passed into history."

He dismissed the notion that petting had any negative impact on future relationships or that promiscuity put someone at risk for marital unhappiness.

Terman looked at what happened during sex and seemed confused. A third of the women he studied were "inadequate"--that is, they never or rarely reached orgasm. "The inability of a large proportion of women to achieve the climax that normally terminates sexual intercourse is one of the most puzzling mysteries in the psychology and physiology of sex."

Terman explored the many possible obstacles to pleasure.

He found that wives who were married to men with strict religious upbringing were less likely to reach orgasm. He could not tell if too much religion cramped a man's style, or if such men were drawn to the "inadequates."

He found that "inadequate" women avoided intercourse, most of them preferring two or fewer copulations per month, while most "adequate" women preferred seven or more times. He wondered if a man's staying power contributed to pleasure, and concluded that if intercourse lasted less than seven minutes it hurt a woman's chances of being orgasmic, but that lasting longer than 15 minutes "would not reduce the proportion of inadequate wives by more than five or six percent."

Terman asked wives to express a like or dislike of certain professions and subjects. It was a quirky list, with targets that included stockbrokers, communists and people who work for the YMCA.

Terman found that inadequate women were more inclined to express a liking for YMCA types, while adequate women were more inclined to like musicians. Women who reached orgasm easily had a peculiar dislike of pet canaries. Perhaps they knew that the caged bird doesn't sing.

. Considering the year in which they were asked, Terman posed incredibly personal questions. Husbands could check off a variety of complaints about their wives: vagina too large, vagina too small, vagina not moist enough, too animal-like in her passion, likes to engage in unnatural practices. Wives could check off similar shortcomings: penis too large, penis too small, has difficulty in getting an erection, has difficulty in keeping an erection, has ejaculations too quickly, has too little regard for my satisfaction, does not pet enough before beginning intercourse, likes to engage in unnatural practices.

Women who reached orgasm were nearly twice as likely as those who did not reach orgasm to have no complaints. The "inadequates" were more than three times as likely to have seven or more complaints.

Terman found that we were taking more time with the sex act. Men born after 1905 took 32 percent more time copulating than men born before 1880. Clearly, we were looking for something in sex.

Increasingly, personal happiness was to be found below the belt.

Dating and Mating

A Peter Arno cartoon in The New Yorker shows a collegiate couple carrying a car seat and reporting the theft of their automobile.

Car sales declined dramatically during the Depression, but sex and the automobile were still linked in the minds of America. Police learned to patrol lovers' lanes. Tourist cabins and motels sprang up to accommodate the practitioners of make-believe marriage: A sociologist who studied camps on the outskirts of Dallas in 1936 found that "some 2000 Dallas couples used the camps at weekends. In one sample only seven out of 109 Dallas couples gave correct names. Many remained only a few hours. Bona fide travelers were not too popular because they stayed all night, thus decreasing the turnover."

J. Edgar Hoover decried the "hot pillow trade" of tourist camps and "the passion pits" at newly invented drive-in movie theaters.

•

In Since Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote: "There was little sense of a change in the moral code being willfully made, little sense that stolen love was modern adventure. The dilemma was practical. One managed as best one could, was continent or incontinent according to one's individual need and one's individual code, whether of morals or aesthetics or prudence or convenience. If the conventions were in abeyance, it was simply because the times were out of joint and no longer made sense."

Willard Waller described the evolving social etiquette in a 1937 article for the American Sociological Review called "The Rating and Dating Complex." Formal courtship, he noted, was a thing of the past. "The decay of this moral structure has made possible the emergence of thrill seeking and exploitative relationships. A thrill is merely a physiological stimulation and release of tension. Whether we approve or not, courtship practices today allow for a great deal of pure thrill seeking. Dancing, petting, necking, the automobile, the amusement park and a whole range of institutions and practices permit or facilitate thrill-seeking behavior."

Waller provides a glimpse of the values formed in high school and college: "Young men are desirable dates according to their rating on the scale of campus values. In order to have class-A rating they must belong to one of the better fraternities, be prominent in activities, have a copious supply of spending money, be well dressed, smooth in manners and appearance, have a good line, dance well and have access to an automobile."

Gone were any considerations of character, or of a man's ability to provide security in the future. Waller describes men who practiced a calculated seduction: The line was a "conventional attempt on the part of the young man to convince the young woman that he has already at this early stage fallen seriously in love with her, a sort of exaggeration, sometimes a burlesque of coquetry."

The mating dance was complicated. "It may be that each, by a pretense of great involvement, invites the other to rapid sentiment formation--each encourages the other to fall in love by pretending that he has already done so."

Rapid sentiment formation? Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you undergoing rapid sentiment formation? College students read books such as Jack Hanley's Let's Make Mary: Being a Gentleman's Guide to Scientific Seduction in Eight Easy Lessons. Beth Bailey, in From Front Porch to Back Seat, suggests that sex was not the ultimate goal of dating. Image making, the appearance of popularity, guided our social dance. The rating system ignored talent, looks, personality and importance in organizations if those attributes were not translatable into dates. "These dates," writes Bailey, "had to be highly visible and with many different people."

Women who chose to be faithful to a male friend at a different school (i.e., they did not play the dating game) were known as campus widows. On one campus they wore yellow ribbons and met to read letters from faraway lovers.

Everyone else played the game.

In 1938 Dorothy Bromley and Florence Britten published their study of 1300 college students. Their findings rocked the nation. The June 6, 1938 issue of Life reported on the study.

One girl out of four in college had had sexual relations. Of every two male undergraduates, one was a virgin and one was not. Boys began having sex in high school, while girls tended to wait until they were in college. In great contrast to their fathers, wrote Bromley, "three quarters of the men were willing to marry nonvirgin girls--and this number included men who had not yet indulged in sex relations themselves."

If the world was no longer divided between women who did (fallen women and prostitutes) and women who didn't (wives or future wives), how did we describe ourselves? Bromley created new subspecies of sexually active humans. Male virgins were divided into those who were continent because of "ideals and standards" and those who avoided sex because of "fears and inhibitions." Sexually active males were "moderates" or "hotbloods"--the latter, the "crude, lusty young animals" popular on campus.

Women received similar treatment. Some 12 percent of college girls (who hadn't yet had sex) were "virginal"--either innocent or unawakened. Almost a quarter were "the wait for marriage" type, who were "awake but cautious." Some 37 percent were simply "inexperienced"--the girl who had "not gone wrong yet, possibly because she was never given a chance, but she believes extramarital relations are all right." Among those who had sex were "the loving" (the 11 percent who had had an affair with one man) and "the experimenter" (the nine percent who deliberately entered into sex relationships to see what they were like). "She pursues a trial and error course with different men as scientific subjects," reported Life. "She is intellectually serious, comes from a liberal home, expects to marry someday."

And then there was "the sower of wild oats" (3.5 percent), a girl who was downright promiscuous.

Bromley found a few men and women who had homosexual experiences. Life dismissed these with one sentence: "A small number of physiological and psychological misfits completed this study."

Typical of the times, Life ran Bromley's findings as a box accompanying an article on a teenage couple who, finding the girl pregnant, made a suicide pact. The girl died, the boy didn't.

Mrs. Grundy's Disease

The silence that once surrounded syphilis disappeared by the late Thirties. In 1937 Anthony Turano complained in the American Mercury that decorum kept the Associated Press and the United Press from using the words syphilis, gonorrhea or venereal disease in news dispatches. Yet the same publications did "not hesitate to describe daily the absorbent qualities of Kotex, the latest thing in hernia supports or the best nostrum for hemorrhoids."

The National Broadcasting Co. had prevented a doctor from using the word syphilis on the air; the Columbia Broadcasting System refused to allow Dr. Thomas Parran, later surgeon general of the U.S., to discuss the topic. "The reason in both cases," complained Turano, "was, of course, the indecency of mentioning copulation to mixed audiences. Presumably a wave of sexual promiscuity would overtake the Republic if it were generally known to persons of all ages that pathogenic germs may attack the genital region as well as other portions of the body, and that medical remedies are available in each case."

But magazines discussed the deadly details freely: Turano's article noted that 683,000 cases of syphilis were under treatment, and that 423,000 new cases arose each year. Because most never received medical care, the total estimated number of infected Americans was placed at 12 million.

One enlightened company gave blood tests to 36,800 workers in 17 states, then referred infected workers to free clinics or family doctors. According to Turano, some physicians simply ignored the Wassermann results and issued "certificates of good moral character, testifying that their patients were not the kind of persons who could have contracted such a reprehensible disease." These doctors put the hypocritic oath before the Hippocratic.

Fear of venereal disease was the most powerful weapon left for puritan America. In August 1937 Reader's Digest published The Case for Chastity by Margaret Culkin Banning. The author, a mother of four, set for herself the task of answering the challenge, "If there is a case for chastity, it should be stated."

After bemoaning the "parked and lightless cars on side roads everywhere," the couples' trade at tourist cabins, the hotels adjacent to colleges, Banning described the consequences of unchastity: "The highest attack rate for syphilis occurs during the early adult years, 16 to 30. If venereal disease is ultimately stamped out, one risk of unchastity will be destroyed. But we are a long way from that yet. In the meantime there is a serious and constant danger of disease in premarital relations."

But the crusader for chastity was not done. Banning attacked the prevailing methods of birth control: 25 percent of condoms, she wrote, were imperfect. The strongest douche was successful only ten percent of the time: "Figures show beyond a doubt that a tremendous number of unmarried young women go to abortionists. No doubt many of them have heard the current claptrap about an abortion being nothing at all to endure. Let them also hear this: Ten thousand girls and women lose their lives each year at the hands of abortionists."

The editors at Reader's Digest did not print Banning's estimated number of abortions (700,000), but they did note her claim that there were 50,000 births each year to unwed mothers. No one kept track of these numbers. As a moral argument against sex, illegitimate children stayed at the edge of the debate during the Thirties. The numbers, though shocking, were small enough to be handled discreetly. Instead, Banning worked the fear angle. The Reader's Digest article cited one Dr. Frederick Taussig: "Also, for every woman who dies as a result of abortion, several women are disabled, sometimes permanently, or rendered sterile or, at a subsequent pregnancy, suffer from the aftereffects of the abortion."

Unchastity kills.

The Crusade Against VD

An article in Ladies' Home Journal proclaimed: "In a citywide referendum of Chicago's 3.5 million people, 92 out of 100 persons voted to stamp out syphilis. In a nationwide poll by the American Institute of Public Opinion, 87 people out of 100 voted likewise."

America was willing to tackle the problem of venereal disease. Most Americans wanted to reduce the wages of sin or abolish them altogether. Some states passed laws requiring blood tests for a marriage license. Newspapers in Chicago published the names of couples who went out of state to avoid the test.

In 1936 Surgeon General Parran wrote an article for Reader's Digest entitled Why Don't We Stamp Out Syphilis? A year later, he co-authored another article for Ladies' Home Journal entitled We Can End This Sorrow.

"We might virtually stamp out this disease," Dr. Parran admonished, "were we not hampered by the widespread belief that nice people don't talk about syphilis, that nice people don't have syphilis, and that nice people shouldn't do anything about those who do have syphilis."

The science existed to beat the disease. A complete cure required some 60 weekly visits to a doctor or clinic for painful injections of arsenicals and heavy metals. Most patients, unfortunately, stopped treatment after symptoms disappeared. And many doctors simply cut off treatment for patients unable to pay.

Parran called for doctors to take action, to overcome their own moral lethargy, not only to suspect that patients might harbor the microbe but to seek out the disease with treatment. Not everyone in government shared the surgeon general's view.

On May 17, 1937 J. Edgar Hoover ordered agents to raid ten vice dens in Baltimore. On August 30, 1937 he personally led more than 100 agents in vice raids in Atlantic City, Wilmington and Philadelphia. The New York Times noted that the G-men moved "by synchronized watches," meaning agents entered 16 disorderly houses precisely at midnight to arrest 137 prostitutes, their maids, proprietors and a few men.

Hoover and The New York Times billed the raids as a blow against the white slave trade. But a follow-up story a few days later told a more chilling tale. Hoover arrested two physicians who had periodically examined and treated the "inmates of the raided disorderly houses." They were accused of "withholding knowledge of a felony." They had knowingly aided in the white slave traffic. Hoover's message was clear: Try to stop VD at its source and you will go to jail.

J. Edgar, Sex Cop

In early 1932 almost no one had heard of the Bureau of Investigation, let alone its director. The federal police force, which numbered only 326 in 1932, was responsible for enforcing federal laws on interstate commerce, antitrust and vice--specially in the form of enforcing the Mann Act and policing the distribution and sale of obscene literature.

Hoover instructed agents to send obscene and improper material to Washington, where they became a permanent part of the Obscene File. The FBI collection included stag movies, photographs, books, pamphlets, freehand drawings, explicit cartoons and playing cards. Like Comstock before him, Hoover invoked innocent youth to demonize "purveyors of obscene materials" who "disseminate their products among schoolchildren and adults with perverted minds." He told field agents that he wanted to see such material "regardless of the source from which they are obtained. Even though no federal violation exists, any material of this nature made available by local police agencies should be transmitted to the bureau in order to increase the effectiveness of the Obscene File."

Athan Theoharis, author of J. Edgar Hoover, Sex and Crime, reports that when an inventory of the Obscene File was conducted in 1966, it was found to contain more than 13,000 films, magazines and the like.

Hoover's concern with policing the virtue of the nation surfaced in several ways. He personally reviewed every hint of impropriety: If someone were a suspected Communist, that information went into the official file. If someone had been accused of immorality, that information went into Hoover's private Official and Confidential File. Hiding the Obscene File and the private files kept Hoover's obsession hidden from Congress.

In 1933 an article in Collier's magazine ridiculed Hoover, claiming that he was an "immature" gumshoe out for publicity. "In appearance, Mr. Hoover looks utterly unlike the storybook sleuth. He dresses fastidiously, with Eleanor blue as the favored color for the matched shades of tie, handkerchief and socks. He is short, fat, businesslike and walks with a mincing step."

In 1933 Hoover, 38, was unmarried and still living with his mother. The allegation he was less than manly prompted him to take action. Rumors that Hoover was gay would follow him to his grave. To be fair, Hoover would probably have taken equal offense at false reports linking him with a woman. He did not date, period. The FBI was his mistress.

When gangsters killed an FBI agent in a shoot-out in Kansas City, Missouri, Hoover launched a counteroffensive. He filled the department with hired guns and went after John Dillinger. Agents surrounded the bank robber in Little Bohemia (a resort in Wisconsin) but botched the operation, shooting three innocent bystanders, killing one. Working through an Indiana policeman, the FBI cut a deal with Mrs. Anna Sage, the madam of a local Chicago brothel, who faced deportation. She would finger Dillinger in return for help with immigration authorities.

The "lady in red" accompanied Dillinger and his girlfriend to a Chicago screening of Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable and William Powell. When they emerged from the theater, agents gunned down the gangster.

Dillinger was still the better man. He was a local hero and a ladies' man, and urban legend had it that he was uncommonly well endowed and that his organ was on display at the Smithsonian. The real souvenir was a death mask of the outlaw kept by Hoover in his outer office at the FBI building.

When the press scoffed that Hoover had never made an arrest, he showed up for the carefully orchestrated arrest of Alvin Karpis in New Orleans.

The gun battles and headlines diverted criticism of Hoover's role as chief of the sex police, for he was responsible for enforcing the Mann Act. Originally intended to control the largely imaginary interstate traffic in white slaves, the law had become the pet sex law of puritans, a law that was used to punish any sexual escapade that crossed state lines. Hoover wrote that noncommercial violations of the Mann Act were prosecuted only under "aggravated circumstances."

According to David Langum, author of the definitive history of the Mann Act, Hoover used the law selectively to punish gangsters, black men who dared to travel with white girlfriends, the politically obnoxious and undifferentiated riffraff (con men, brothel owners and the like). Even if there was no prosecution, Hoover used investigations to fill his administrative files.

After Hoover's widely publicized vice raids in the late Thirties, one journalist challenged the FBI, saying the Mann Act was an excuse for government to collect dirt and control politics through blackmail. Under Hoover, the average number of Mann Act prosecutions reached 400 cases annually. The average sentence rose from a little longer than a year in 1930 to 38 months in 1939.

The Mann Act, Thirties Style

"The soul of Cotton Mather marches on. Under the famous Mann Act, the enforcement of the Seventh Commandment is still the special business of the national constabulary and the wages of sexual sin are fixed at five years in prison and a $5000 fine--a penalty considerably higher than is usually paid for bank robbery or manslaughter."

Thus did Anthony Turano characterize the Mann Act in the American Mercury. Noting that state laws already provided adequate penalties for rape or consensual sex with a minor, he attacked the Feds for using the Mann Act to police the "voluntary indiscretions of mature citizens."

"When a biological accord has already been reached between man and maid," wrote Turano, "a moving vehicle is more of a nuisance than a provocation, and their purpose in traveling is seldom more wicked than the wish to be elsewhere. The ludicrous result is that for the first time in the history of law and morals, adultery is treated as a geographical offense: There is no crime unless the gentle passion combines with wanderlust."

In a 1930 case a man named C.W. Aplin lived with a 22-year-old woman for four months, then moved with her from Salem, Oregon to Las Vegas. As Turano noted, "No sane person would repeat a state peccadillo in order to elevate it into a federal felony," but Aplin was sent to jail for two and a half years because a jury thought the move was evidence of "debauchery."

"It is difficult to see," wrote Turano, "what salutary social end is served by making the national government a smut-seeking referee in the private sins of the citizenry."

Author David Langum grants that, under Hoover, most noncommercial Mann Act cases involved aggravated--if not ludicrous--circumstances: "In United States vs. Grace (1934) a bishop of the House of Prayer for All People engaged in sex with a female member of his flock, sometimes at the unusual location of the floor of his chauffeured automobile while motoring through New Jersey. Whether or not this ministration was good for her soul is problematic, but it did result in her pregnancy. In King vs. United States (1932) a traveling salesman, so the prosecutor alleged, convinced a naive young woman of 18 that she had a disease which if left uncured would result in her inability to have children. He took her out in the country in the evening, crossing over a state line, to demonstrate the 'electrode' that would cure her. Whether he succeeded in alleviating a nonexistent disease is unclear, but he did succeed in seducing the young woman, giving her gonorrhea."

Critics pointed out that the Mann Act was hopelessly biased: A woman who transported a married man across state lines, doing the "devil's work" at every stop, could not be prosecuted. The courts would believe that a female witness had been "mesmerized"--and therefore was not responsible for repeatedly violating the Mann Act on a crosscountry train trip.

Who Controls Reproduction?

In 1931 Francis Packard wrote the 1266 page book History of Medicine in the U.S.A. The words "birth control" appear nowhere in the text. Five years later, Dr. Norman Himes tried to correct the oversight with the Medical History of Contraception. He found the desire to control fertility in virtually every culture and age. Only the methods had changed.

By 1936 condom sales in the U.S. approached $317 million annually. The 15 chief manufacturers produced 1.5 million condoms a day. The desire to limit fertility was as enormous as the methods were inefficient.

Dr. Hannah Stone studied 1987 case histories from the Newark Maternal Health Center and found that 956 patients (48 percent) reported using condoms, 1267 (64 percent) had relied on coitus interruptus and 507 had used Lysol as a douche.

None of the methods of controlling birth seemed particularly effective: 45 percent of those who used condoms found themselves facing parenthood, almost 60 percent of those who relied on withdrawal became pregnant and douching failed 71 percent of the time.

In his journal, Edmund Wilson described the postcoital moment, some version of which occurred across America every night. His wife felt, "I ought to have engraved on my tombstone: You'dBetter go in and Fix yourself up."

At other times, he said, "she used to ask me why I didn't wear a condom so that she wouldn't be put to the trouble of going to take a douche."

Personal squabbles over birth control were nothing compared with global debates. In 1930 the Anglican bishops had granted recognition of birth control. Pope Pius XI retaliated with Casti Connubii, an encyclical forbidding any artificial regulation of fertility: "Any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the [sex] act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin."

The Pope sentenced Catholics to "Vatican roulette." By 1933 two researchers had looked at the birth dates of military families and had been able to pinpoint the moment of conception. (Luckily, for most families, it coincided with leave dates.) From that data, the researchers determined that a woman ovulated approximately two weeks before her period. Lab tests had discovered that an unfertilized egg died after 36 hours. By avoiding certain days of the month, couples could prevent conception. Dr. Leo Latz recommended that couples abstain for a week around the middle of each monthly cycle, and taught women how to chart their "rhythm calendars."

By 1930 there were more than 225 birth control clinics in the U.S. Some were associated with hospitals, and most were run by followers of Margaret Sanger. Birth control was not yet a medical discipline: Only 13 of the top 75 medical schools in the country bothered to teach contraception as a regular part of the curriculum.

Sanger smuggled diaphragms into the country. Both state and federal law had prohibited doctors from talking about contraceptives. For years, Sanger had tried to get the laws rewritten to allow doctors to prescribe and fit diaphragms. Her crusade met fierce resistance. Father Charles Coughlin used his national radio show to spread his message: "We know that contraceptives are bootlegged in corner drugstores surrounding our high schools. Why are they around the high schools? To teach them to fornicate and not get caught. All this bill means is how to fornicate and not get caught."

Father Wendell Corey of Notre Dame was more hateful: "Continue the practice [of birth control]," he said, "and the sons of the yellow man or the black will someday fill the president's chair in Washington."

The terms of the argument were mired in hate. Something had to give. In 1933 lawyer Morris Ernst, the same man who had defended Ulysses, contacted Dr. Hannah Stone. She placed an order for 120 pessaries from Japan. After Customs officials seized the shipment, Ernst took them to court. The United States vs. One Package of Japanese Pessaries was a brilliant victory. Ernst put doctors on the stand and solicited a list of cases in which a pregnancy could threaten a woman's life. Contraceptives thus served a medical need.

Then Ernst invoked the Depression: "How about a case where the mother has four or five children and the husband has been out of work or has a $6 or $8 income? Would the health of the family be imperiled if there were another child, and if that is so, because of lack of food, nutrition, decent home, decent housing, would there not be such cases where the health of the family would be benefited by such a prescription?"

The judge ruled that Congress and Customs had no place coming between a doctor and his patients. The decision withstood an appeal.

In March 1938 Ladies' Home Journal published the results of a survey: 79 percent of American women favored birth control. (The figures by religion: Of Protestant women, 84 percent favored birth control; of Catholics, 51 percent.) More than three quarters of those supporting birth control cited family income, the notion that parents should not have more children than they can properly care for, as the moral justification for birth control.

It should be noted that the papal encyclical against artificial means of birth control included condemnation of abortion. The main objection to birth control was that people who practiced family limitation with unreliable methods inevitably became pregnant. Then they resorted to abortion, which the church viewed as the taking of innocent life. The most zealous priests even insisted that the embryonic remains of miscarriage should be baptized so that the souls could go to heaven.

Although millions of women had abortions, abortionists were still held in contempt as racketeers who corrupted coroners and medical examiners to cover botched illegal operations. Headlines claimed that abortion was a $100 mil-lion-a-year business. Time followed the case of a West Coast abortarium that had been closed by officials.

In the entire decade abortion stayed underground. A few brave doctors began to defend the practice, arguing that abortion should be legalized to take it out of the hands of "unskilled quacks." Dr. William Robinson wrote The Law Against Abortion, in which he argued that "the law has not done away with abortions--about two million of them are performed in the U.S. annually--but it has driven them into dark places."

Dr. Robinson contended that abortion could preserve the health of the mother, including her mental health. It was an argument that would not prevail until another 40 years had passed.

Eugenics

The most important issue of the decade would be who controlled reproduction. It was an issue that would eventually be settled by war. Eugenics--the theory of improving racial stock--had swept America. According to Garland Allen, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, by 1928 there were 376 college courses devoted to teaching Americans the dark side of birth control. By selecting proper parents, nations could breed traits such as leadership, humor, generosity, sympathy, loyalty, genius. By denying reproductive rights to "defectives," one could eliminate hereditary blindness, deafness and epilepsy, as well as "alcoholism, pauperism, prostitution, rebelliousness, criminality and feeblemindedness."

Leading eugenicists claimed that "social behaviors of not only individual family members but also whole nations were genetically fixed at birth." The Irish were suspicious. Jewish people displayed a genetic trait of "obtrusiveness."

In America, the theory was used to limit immigration. Immigrants were considered to be the dregs of humanity. In the depth of the Depression, it was argued that the social cost of caring for defectives placed a huge burden on an already taxed economy. (One much quoted study said that if the government had sterilized one woman--deemed defective in 1790--it would have saved an estimated $2 million in care for her descendants by the Twenties. For want of a $150 operation, went the argument, millions were lost.)

In America 30 states enacted compulsory sterilization laws for those considered likely to give birth to socially defective children. Between 1907 and 1941 more than 60,000 forced sterilizations were performed in the U.S.

Nazi Germany borrowed American expertise to draft its own sterilization law. Between 1933 and 1937, Nazis sterilized 400,000 wards of the state, most involuntarily. The government decided who was valuable and who was valueless.

Carrying the cost-benefit analysis to its darkest extreme, the German state decided that euthanasia was cheaper than sterilization. State-controlled sexuality led to the Holocaust. Hitler had convinced Germans that the state held the ultimate solution--that Germany could achieve racial superiority and begin a 1000-year Reich. Today, Germany, he declared. Tomorrow, the World.

The World of Tomorrow

The 1939 New York World's Fair offered a vision of the World of Tomorrow. Fairgoers saw exhibits presenting technology's answers for a better world. Murals celebrated hydroelectric power, the great dams and power lines built during the Depression. A car company that had survived the Crash showed streamlined models in "Futurama." A boy seeing a television broadcast for the first time would say he preferred radio because the pictures were better.

The fair had a whole section designated the "Amusement Area," for which surrealist Salvador Dalí created the Dream of Venus concession. Inside four diving tanks "living girls, nude to the waist," played with giant rubber telephones and swam past melting watches.

Another exhibitor presented living magazine covers, where topless women posed for a Romantic Life Magazine dated 1949. We were smart enough to realize that no matter what the future held, sex would play a part in it.

A local minister complained about the "menace to morals" posed by die Amusement Area, and officials issued a "Mandatory Bras and Net Coverings" order. Mayor La Guardia, invoking a little-used power of office, held court outside the fair, sentencing three men who had tried to hold a Miss Nude of 1939 beauty pageant in the Cuban Village.

The fair held the promise that nations could work together to solve their problems. Harper's would note: "In a world swept by terror and hysteria, 60 nations have participated in the fair." One nation--Germany--was notably absent.

War had broken out in Europe. Soon, women would find themselves working in factories, fulfilling the suffragettes' dream of equality and liberation. And men, fighting to save the world, would become men again.

America was discovering that poverty had the same power to change sex as prosperity.

Your Hit Parade

Tunes From the Thirties

Body and Sold * A Cottage for Sale * Blue, Turning Gray Over You * Embraceable You * Love for Sale * On the Sunny Side of the Street * Puttin' on the Ritz * Sophisticated Lady * Mood Indigo * Dancing in the Dark * Goodnight Sweetheart * The Thrill Is Gone

Learn to Croon * All of Me * I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In the Five and Ten Cent Store) * Just a Gigolo * Minnie the Moocher

Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams * Star Dust * Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? * I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues * In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town * It's Only a Paper Moon * Smoke Gets in Your Eyes * Stormy Weather * Street of Dreams * Temptation* Try a Little Tenderness

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? * Yesterdays * Anything Goes * Boulevard of Broken Dreams * I Get a Kick Out of You * I Only Have Eyes for You * You Oughta Be in Pictures * You're the Top* Blue Moon * Begin the Beguine * Cheek to Cheek * I'm in the Mood for Love * Just One of Those Things * Top Hat, White Tie and Tails

Let's Face the Music and Dance * The Music Goes 'Round and Around * Pennies From Heaven * You Turned the Tables on Me * A Foggy Day * Harbor Lights * I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm

The Lady Is a Tramp * Let's Call the Whole Thing Off * Let's Have Another Cigarette * The Moon Got in My Eyes * My Funny Valentine * Nice Work If You Can Get It * Once in Awhile * One O'Cbck Jump * Somebody Else Is Taking My Place * That Old Feeling * They All Laughed * Too Marvelous for Words * Where or When * With Plenty of Money and You

You're Laughing at Me * A-Tisket A-Tasket * By Myself Falling in Love With Love * Flat Foot Floogie * Get Out of Town * Hooray I for Hollywood * I Wanna Be in Winchell's Column * I'll Be Seeing You * I've Got a Pocketful of Dreams * Jeepers Creepers * My Heart Belongs to Daddy * Please Be Kind

Someday My Prince Will Come * Thanks for the Memory * This Can't Be Love * This Is My Night to Dream * Whistle While You Work * You Go to My Head * You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby * All the Things You Are * Beer Barrel Polka

Deep Purple * Don't Worry 'Bout Me * I Didn't Know What Time It Was * I Get Along Without You Very Well * If I Didn't Care * In the Mood * Moonlight Serenade * Stairway to the Stars * What's New * Wishing * Careless * If I Knew Then * You're a Sweet Little Heartache * Over the Rainbow

The Battle of the Sexes

Great Lines from The Golden Age Of Cinema

"Baby, you're the key to my ignition."--Charlotte Greenwood to Eddie cantor in Palmy Days, 1931

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"Aw, I wouldn't go for that dame if she was the last woman on earth--and I just got out of the Navy."--James Cagney in Taxi!, 1932

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"She only said no once, and then she didn't hear the question."--George E. Stone about Ginger Rogers in 42nd Street, 1933

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"Outside, Countess. As long as they've got sidewalks, you've got a job."--Joan Blondell to Claire Dodd in Footlight Parade, 1933

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"Do you know that she makes $45 a week and sends her mother a hundred Of it?"--Ginger Rogers in 42nd Street, 1933

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"From now on you're the only man in the world my door is closed to."--Norma Shearer to Husband Chester morris in The Divorcée, 1930

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"Can you see through this?"

"I'm afraid you can, dear."

"I'll take it."--Jean Harlow to a Shopgirl while Trying on a Dress in Red Headed Woman, 1932

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"You're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did."--Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, 1933

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"Haven't you ever met a man that could make you happy?"

"Sure, lots of times."--Cary Grant and Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, 1933

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"I was reading that machinery is going to take the place of every profession."

"Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."--Exchange between Jean Harlow and Marie dressler in Dinner at Eight, 1933

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"I read you were shot five times in the tabloids."

"It's not true. He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids."--Mynaloy and William powell in The Thin Man, 1934"

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A wedding is a funeral where you smell your own flowers."--Edie Cantor in Kid Millions, 1934

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"Why didn't you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped 40 Cars."--Clark Gable to Claudette Colbert on her Hitchhiking Technique in It happened one Night, 1934

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"Love has got to stop someplace short of suicide."--Walter Huston to wife Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth, 1936

"When I get back to my room, you're the only thing I want to find missing."--Ginger Rogers to roommate Gail Patrick in Stage Door, 1937

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"Why didn't you starve first?"--Humphrey Bogart to Claire Trevor on Discovering his Former Girlfriend is A prostitute, in Dead End, 1937

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"I guess it was easier for her to change her name than for her whole family to change theirs."--Irene Dunne about Joyce Compton in The Awful Truth, 1937

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"If I hold you any closer, I'll be in back of you."--Groucho Marx to Esther Muir in A Day at the Races, 1937

"Do you think there's anything wrong with a guy that don't want a girl to kiss him all the time? Cynthia, oh, she'll let you kiss her whenever you want. She doesn't want to play tennis, go for walks. All she wants to do is kiss you. I'm a nervous wreck."--Mickey Rooney to Lewis Stone in Love Finds Andy Hardy, 1938

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"I'm sicka hearing about men that do the little things. Give me a guy that does a big thing once in a while, like paying a month's rent."--Mary Phillips in Mannequin, 1938

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"Ninotchka, it's midnight. One half of Paris is making love to the other half."--Melvyn Douglas to Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, 1939

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"I know exactly how you feel, my dear. The morning after always does look grim if you happen to be wearing last night's dress."--Ina Claire to Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, 1939

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"My mother told me never to enter any man's room in months ending in R."--Irene Dunne to Charles Boyer in Love Affair, 1939

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"Someday you'll realize that glamour isn't the only thing in the world. If your show's a flop, you'll find you can't eat glamour for breakfast."--Judy Garland, Looking at a Photo of Mickey Rooney, Who has given the lead to another woman, in Babes in Arms, 1939

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"Sir, you are no gentleman."

"And you, miss, are no lady."--Exchange between Vivien Leigh and Clark gable on their first meeting in Gone With the Wind, 1939

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"You should be kissed, and often, by someone who knows how."--Clark Gable to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, 1939"

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Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."--Clark Gables last line to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, 1939

Time Capsule

Raw Data From The Thirties

First Appearances

Airline stewardesses. Grant Wood's American Gothic. The New Deal. NRA. WPA. CCC. AAA. TVA. Family Circle. Life. Esquire. The Petty Girl. The Empire State Building. King Kong. The pinball machine. Beer in cans. Alka-Seltzer. Electric razors. Zippo lighters. Monopoly. Comic books. Blondie. Dick Tracy. Li'l Abner. Flash Gordon. Superman. Batman. Drive-in movie theaters. Bra cup sizes. Tampons. Blood tests for marriage licenses. Dr. Seuss. Sam Spade. Tropic of Cancer. Gone With the Wind. Gallup Poll. Parking meters. Swing music. The Jitterbug.

Who's Hot

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Will Rogers. Clark Gable. Jean Harlow. Mae West. The Marx Brothers. Busby Berkeley. Bing Crosby. Amos 'n' Andy. John Dillinger. J. Edgar Hoover. Walter Winchell. Joe Louis. Jimmy Cagney. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Shirley Temple. Mickey Rooney. Sally Rand. Benny Goodman. Artie Shaw. Duke Ellington. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Adolf Hitler.

Strange Fruit

Number of lynchings of Southern blacks between 1889 and 1940: 3800. Percentage of lynching victims accused of attempted rape from 1889 to 1929: 16.7. Percentage actually convicted of rape: 6.7.

Birth of a Nation

Population of the U.S. in 1930: 123 million. Population in 1940: 132 million. For every person entering the U.S., number of people who return to old country: 3.

Money Matters

Gross national product in 1930: $90.4 billion. GNP in 1940: $99.7 billion. Price of a share of U.S. Steel before the Crash: $261-3/4; in November 1929: $150. Price in 1932: $21-1/4. Price of a share of General Electric before the Crash: $396-1/4; in November 1929: $168-1/2. Price in 1932: $34. Year the stock market would return to its 1929 level: 1954. Drop in wages between 1929 and 1932: 60 percent.

Movie Madness

Percentage of films that dealt with crime, sex or love in 1920: 82. In 1930: 72. Weekly movie attendance in 1930: 90 million. In 1931: 60 million. In 1936: 88 million. Box office earnings in 1930: $730 million. In 1932: $527 million. Of 16,000 theaters, number that closed by the end of 1933: 5000. Number of scripts reviewed by the Production Code Administration in 1937: 2584. Number of films screened: 1489. Number of official opinions delivered: 6477.

Marriage

Number of colleges offering a course in marriage in 1926: 1. In 1936: more than 200. Name of zoology professor appointed to coordinate marriage courses at Indiana University in the late Thirties: Alfred Kinsey.

Average age of marriage for men in 1930: 24.3. For women: 21.3. Average age of marriage for men in 1939: 26.7. For women: 23.3.

Of 792 married couples interviewed by psychologist Lewis Terman, number who slept in the same bed: 596. Number who slept in separate beds: 130. Number who slept in separate bedrooms: 51. Of the 792 couples, number of wives who had ever wished they were men: 242. Number of husbands who had ever wished they were women: 20.

Banned in Boston

Books that had finally been admitted by U.S. Customs by 1933: Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, James Joyce's Ulysses. Book published in 1934 but banned in U.S. until 1964: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Books banned in Boston: Boccaccio's Decameron, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Cald-well's God's Little Acre. Banned in Detroit: Casanova's Memoirés, Hemingway's To Have and Have Not.

Mann Act

Number of Mann Act convictions in 1930: 516. Average jail sentence in months: 14. Number of Mann Act convictions in 1939: 524. Average sentence in months: 37.9.

Radio Waves

Percentage of American homes that had a radio in 1929: 33. Percentage in 1934: 60; by 1939: 86. Number of hours per day of listening in 1937: 4-1/2. Number of soap operas in 1931:3. Number in 1939: 61.

Newsstand Morality

Among stories in popular magazines circa 1900, percentage of plots that condoned the hero or heroine's extramarital sex relations: 3. Percentage of plots in the movies and magazines that condoned extramarital sex relations in 1932: 45.

Final Appearances

1930: Judge Joseph Crater.

1931: Thomas Edison.

1932: Florenz Ziegfeld.

1933: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

1935: Will Rogers.

1937: Jean Harlow.

1937: The Hindenburg.

1939: Havelock Ellis.

1939: Sigmund Freud.