Setback

Into the Boston courtroom of Harvard-trained Municipal Judge Elijah Adlow, 48, marched the watchdogs of the New England Watch & Ward Society, eager to score their fourth book-banning in a year.* They marched out again, having suffered one of the worst defeats in 66 years of protecting Boston from naughty thoughts.

Judge Adlow refused to agree that Erskine Caldwell's novel Tragic Ground was an obscene book and dismissed charges against the bookstore clerk who sold it. He went further. He found nothing shocking in a scene in which a female character is allowed to see a man stripped to the waist. "Do you think anybody would be astounded to hear that?" he cried. Then, turning to the detective on the stand, he asked, "Have you read Anthony Adverse?" The detective had not. "That," said the Judge, "is the trouble with the police department. They haven't a big enough library."

"This isn't indecent literature," he went on. "It is dull--you would have to be chained to a chair to read it. ... I'm getting tired of books being banned. It is getting so this court's business is divided between booksellers and bookmakers. The police would do better to bring in a few pickpockets and burglars."

-The previous three: Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber, Joseph S. Pennell's The History of Rome Hanks.

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