Pawky Promises

Obviously, all of the 2,534,658 readers of .the Ladies' Home Journal are not nice old ladies. In fact, there are not that many nice old ladies who can read, in the U. S. Who, then, makes possible this circulation? Perhaps an advertising campaign which has been carried on sporadically more than a year may answer the question.

"In this audaciously frank autobiography, the most glamorous figure since Lord Byron shares with us his confessions and his memories. ... Strange wastrel days ... flashes of long-gone frolics ... These astounding confessions bid fair to become the sensation of the literary year," said a Ladies' Home Journal advertisement in October, 1925. The article, thus heralded, appeared: it was neither rowdy nor pornographic. It was the well-mannered and suave memoirs of John Barrymore. Titillatable females who had been led to expect red-hot nights increased the circulation of the Ladies' Home Journal and were undoubtedly disappointed.

More advertisements re-whetted jaded appetites in 1926 and 1927 --"DANCE MAGIC, Jahala the beautiful" ... "Will Every Marriage End in Divorce Within Eleven Years?" . . . "Must the American Theatre be Salacious to Live?" ... "What a Nice Girl Can Do." . . . But still the contents remained comparatively pure and the circulation grew.

Last week the April issue of the Ladies' Home Journal was announced with full-page newspaper displays which shouted: "Ring down the Curtain on the Obscene! Obscene books, obscene magazines, obscene newspapers and obscene plays [nice word, obscene--a word to get a kind of circulation with] are multiplying with astounding rapidity throughout every corner of the United States! [Exclamation marks are sometimes effective] ... Women's clubs, churches, teachers and all decent folk in general owe it to themselves to face the facts-- the sinister facts, as set forth by Frederic F. Van de Water in 'The Obscene Drama' in the April issue now on sale, ten cents.'

Stimulated prospects produced their dimes, encountered a dull but comprehensive survey of theatre censorship in Manhattan--which genteelly referred to the three recently attacked plays but did not mention them by name.* The article made such conclusions as: "It is possible that both sides were right. . . . Perhaps, after all, New York does not care particularly what happens." And then the nice old ladies and other dime spenders read an editorial entitled, "Part Men, Part Goats," by Barton Wood Currie, who came from the New York Evening World to the Country Gentleman and from there in 1920 to edit the Ladies' Home Journal. Said he: "There is a new order of nobility that the press of our great cities and the pink and green pamphleteers of our literati have exalted to the highest place among us almost overnight. The distinguishing symbols of this order are a stubby pair of goat's horns and an elongated goat's tail. There may be added a hairy pair of goat's legs, but they are rather superfluous in a country that carries 24,000,000 automobiles on its highways. ... The motto seems to be, in the editorial sanctums where all this muck is compounded for public consumption, If it makes good, lewd reading--go the limit. . . . THE GOAT MEN HAVE SCALED THE BARRIERS AND COMMAND THE CITADEL."

Readers of Editor Currie asked themselves: Have the goat men stormed the citadel of the Ladies' Home Journal? Is it possible that a magazine founded (in 1883) to give "authoritative service to the Womanhood of America" can have as its policy, If it make's exciting advertising and builds the circulation--go the limit? Is it possible that Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, who refuses to allow cigaret and patent medicine advertisements in his magazines, can sanction suggestive self-advertising by his ladies' journal? Can it be that an apostle of printed probity will now tempt the public with pawky promises?

*The largest issue of any standard-size U. S. newspaper is the Sunday issue of the Hearstian New York American, which claims 1,120,022 Sunday readers

*The Captive (artistic), Sex and The Virgin Man (rubbish).