The author of The Gangs of New York, the 1928 book Martin Scorsese mined for his new movie, ignited one of H.L. Mencken's great free speech fights against comstocks, pecksniffs and wowsers.
Herbert Asbury first shot to fame when a story he wrote got Mencken's American Mercury banned in Boston. The Boston vice squad arrested the great man himself April 5, 1926, on The Common when he sold a copy of the forbidden journal to the Rev. J. Frank Chase, secretary of the New England Watch and Ward Society.
"He handed me a silver half-dollar," Mencken wrote in his account of the affair. "I bit it as to make sure that it was a good coin."
Chase demanded his arrest. A crowd of Harvard undergraduates cheered. And a Baltimore Sun reporter named W.A.S. Douglas got pinched along with Mencken because he was carrying a copy of the Mercury. Douglas protested that he was covering the story.
"He's got the filth under his arm," roared the vice squad commander, ordering the arrest.
The "filth" was the April 1926 issue of the Mercury, in which Asbury's tale, "Hatrack," was published. "Hatrack" purported to be the story of a prostitute in Asbury's hometown, Farmington, Mo.
It was exactly the kind of story Mencken loved, with hypocritical clergymen, a benighted "booboisie" and a scorned hooker, who if she didn't have a heart of gold had a nice sense of irony. She entertained her Protestant clients in the Catholic cemetery and Catholics in the Masonic cemetery. Cemeteries with their numerous flat slabs seemed to have been frequent resorts for this kind of activity in small Midwestern towns.
She got her name because she was quite scrawny and with her arms extended looked quite like an old-fashioned hatrack.
"Hatrack" is reprinted and Mencken's history of the censorship case is recounted in The Editor, the Bluenose and the Prostitute, edited by Mencken biographer Carl Bode and published in 1988 by Roberts Rinehart Inc.
"Hatrack" was a chapter excerpted from Asbury's first book, Up From Methodism. Asbury had come from a long line of Methodist preachers, but at 14 he had fallen into such sinful pleasures as cigarette smoking and ogling girls. Even worse, he became a newspaperman in New York on the (New York) Sun, the Herald and the Tribune, all long since defunct. But he was not a direct descendant of Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop ordained in America, as many newspapers reported.
"When this got about the country," Mencken noted, "it greatly upset the Methodists who were well aware the bishop died a bachelor."
The New England Watch and Ward Society, led by Rev. Chase, had already managed to get Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry banned in Boston.
On the national level, the leader of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, who gave "comstockery" its very name, bragged that he had fingered 3,600 miscreants and destroyed 160 tons of books, pictures and magazines. Mencken had been battling the wowsers - Puritanical fanatics - of comstockery for at least a decade.
After his arrest in Boston, Mencken was released on his own recognizance. He had a drink with the Sun reporter and went to bed. At his hearing the next morning, he argued that "Hatrack" was "not in fact obscene within any rational meaning of the law, that the American Mercury never printed salacious matter and that my own attacks on comstockery [were aimed at] its raids on serious and meritorious publications."
The next day the judge dismissed the case in about five minutes, saying, "I find no offense was committed."
Mencken had lunch at the Harvard Club where Felix Frankfurter, later an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, announced the verdict to great huzzahs from the assembled faculty and students.
Unfortunately, the celebration was premature. The next day the U.S. Post Office barred the April American Mercury from the mails - at the urging of the Chase, the Watch-and-Warder.
"This action was purely gratuitous and malicious," Mencken said.
After a year of tortuous litigation, during which Asbury and others vigorously defended his story, the charge died with barely a whimper. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals declared the case "academic." The Mercury could not be harmed. All copies of the April edition had already been mailed out.
Asbury was now famous. He gave up newspapering and became a free-lance writer. He published Up From Methodism, including the "Hatrack" chapter, without exciting any wowsers. And a couple years later, he wrote The Gangs of New York, his informal history of a century of crime in the slums of Gotham that still packed enough punch to inspire Scorsese more than six decades later.