Ribbons for Boston

Boston's Library Trustees' shield, designed in 1878 by the late Augustus Saint-Gaudens, has as supporters two nude children (male). On complaints from a group of citizens led by Rev. Michael A. Gearin, Mayor James Michael Curley requested last week that the supporters of the shield graven on the facade of the Mission Hill Public Library should have their pudenda shrouded in granite ribbons. Whether all reproductions of the shield should be similarly ribboned then became a hot argument in Boston.

Boston's reputation for civic censorship is old and well established. It was Boston that forbade Mary Garden to appear in Richard Strauss's Salome. It was Boston that banned the sale of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. It was Boston that kept Scribner's Magazine off the stands for printing the final chapters of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. The list is endless, but Boston's tireless censorship is generally directed at the stage and the printed page. Not for many months has it bothered with sculpture and the fine arts.

Until recently Boston's shock troops were under two commands: the potent Watch & Ward Society, and the Licensing Division of the City of Boston. The Watch & Ward Society was originally an . . organization headed by clergymen who had the co-operation of booksellers in the suppression of erotica. It reached its greatest effectiveness under the leadership of indomitable Rev. Jason Franklin Chase. Reformer Chase died in 1926. The W. & W. received a serious blow when Bishop William Lawrence and several of its directors resigned as a result of the public exposure of the way the society's agents provocateurs had persuaded the proprietor of Cambridge's famed Dunster House Bookshop to sell them a copy of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. W. & W. is now in serious financial difficulties. Boston's forces of righteousness are at present headed by slim, white-haired, horn-spectacled John Michael Casey, chief of the city's Licensing Di vision. For 27 years City Censor Casey, who is on record as having said, "Don't you know that Eugene O'Neill never wrote on a decent theme in his life?", has passed on every theatrical offering of the Boston stage. He also licenses peddlers and news boys.

The guardian of Boston's theatrical morals started life as a trap drummer in burlesque houses in the days when chorus ladies carried spears. He became kettledrummer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but his career as a tympanist was cut short when he met with an accident and had to have his right arm amputated at the shoulder. Mr. Casey's father, an upholsterer, was one of the best friends of the then Mayor, Patrick Andrew Collins. Mayor Collins found Mr. Casey the job he still holds.

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