• U.S.

National Affairs: Blease on Blasphemy

3 minute read
TIME

One day last week South Carolina’s Senator Coleman Livingston Blease made one of his customary speeches in the Senate against crime and immorality in the city of Washington. What provoked him was a report by the District of Columbia Grand Jury that the Capital was not the vice-ridden, lawless community it had been pictured. The bristly-haired Senator from South Carolina shouted that in Washington there is no Prohibition “to the wealthy man . . . to the embassies . . . to the cabinet . . . to Mr. Hoover if he does not want to have it . . . to a Senator . . . to a Congressman . . . to any man who has money to buy liquor.”

Suddenly the people in the galleries leaned forward intently, Senators ceased to slouch in their red chairs. Veering away from his familiar subject, Senator Blease waved a red-bound book* in his hand and declared: “I have here a book to which I might call attention. This is a book I sent to Mr. Rover’s [U. S. District Attorney] office—the dirtiest thing I have ever read. I saw a young lady reading it, by accident, and asked her what in the world she was doing reading it. She had not gotten far enough into it, thank God, to see the dirty part of it. On page 97 appears this:

“‘I can shoot the buttons off your God damn pants.’ *

“Listen to that—

“‘Ain’t it in the newspapers, even? God damn right, no. . . . All you bastards in the newspapers. . . .’

“Can you believe it? Down a little further is this wonderful sentence:

“‘Think I want him [a younger brother] running a punch press in a dirty can factory? Holy jumping Jesus Christ!'”

Several persons walked out of the galleries. Others laughed out loud. Senator Blease turned to them:

“This is nothing to laugh at, you gallery people. You’d better go home and take your children and have family prayers and destroy that book. . . .”

Looking very pained at such language in the Senate, Senator Reed Smoot who himself has been making a study of obscene foreign literature to support customs censorship (TIME, Jan. 6), arose and began: “Oh, Mr. President—”

Senator Blease waved him down with: “I’ll not go into that. I have this book and another. They’re in the libraries of this city for children to read. Yet Washington is a clean model city . . . the New Jerusalem, if we listened to the Grand Jury ”

In 1921 the House of Representatives censored, almost expelled, onetime Congressman Thomas Lindsay Blanton of Texas for inserting in the Congressional Record an affidavit detailing a profane quarrel between employes at the Government printing office. Senate newsmen waited to see if anything like that would happen to Senator Blease for his quotations, which he did not edit out of the Congressional Record.

Afterward Senator Blease explained that he had “borrowed” the book from “the young lady,” had not returned it. Investigators failed to find the volume in the Washington Public Library. Local bookstores had sold the last few copies carried.

* DIVERSEY—MacKinlay Kantor—Coward McCann ($2)—A novel of a Chicago newsgatherer, gangsters, machine guns, women.

* A gunman, brandishing an automatic, is bragging of his marksmanship to a newsman.

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