The Sinners and the Scapegoat: Public Reaction in the Press to Mae West's Adam and Eve Skit

Abstract

After appearing on NBC's Chase & Sanborn Hour in December 1937, Hollywood icon Mae West found herself at the center of a firestorm for indecency over the airwaves. Much of the prior scholarship surrounding the incident has focused on the ensuing debate over freedom of expression. In order to gain insight into the Depression-era struggle over morality, this study, by contrast, explores the spectrum of public reaction offered in the mainstream press by journalists, their sources, and their readers. This cultural history of a landmark incident involving freedom of expression in the mass media examines reaction to the radio broadcast in more than twenty newspapers and magazines in the month following the skit.

Notes

The Chase & Sanborn Hour was known by millions of fans as The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show. John Dunning, The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 226.

Steve Craig, “Out of Eden: The Legion of Decency, the FCC, and Mae West's 1937 Appearance on The Chase & Sanborn Hour,” Journal of Radio Studies 13 (November 2006): 232–248; Ramona Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 68, 80; Maurice Leonard, Mae West: Empress of Sex (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 218–219; Simon Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin (New York: MacMillan, 2007), 320; Matthew Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” Colby Quarterly 36 (December 2000): 261–272; Matthew Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. Michelle Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Psychology Press, 2002), 140–145; Theresa Sanders, Approaching Eden: Adam and Eve in Popular Culture (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 68–72; Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 67–69; Jill Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 230–232.

“Business: FCC on Mae West,” Time, January 24, 1938, 51–52.

Watts, Mae West, 230.

Craig, “Out of Eden,” 232–248; Ramona Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 68, 80; Leonard, Mae West, 218–219; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 320; Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 261–272; Smith, Vocal Tracks, 67–69; Watts, Mae West, 230–232.

See, for example, Laura Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Jane Marcellus, Business Girls and Two-Job Wives (New York: Hampton Press, 2011); Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1981); Winifred Wandersee, Women's Work and Family Values, 1920–1940 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1981).

See, for example, Dunning, The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, 226; Herbert Foerstel, Banned in the Media: A Reference Guide to Censorship in the Press (New York: Greenwood Publishing, 1998), 29–31; Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Duluth: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 121; J. Fred MacDonald, Don't Touch That Dial: Radio Programming in American Life, 1920–1960 (New York: Nelson-Hall, 1979), 107; Robert Stanley, Mediavisions (New York: Praeger, 1987), 163.

Craig, “Out of Eden,” 232–248; Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 261–272; Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 140–145.

Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 263.

Craig, “Out of Eden,” 232–248.

Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 261. This cultural history is informed by the cultural studies tradition. See, for example, James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Psychology Press, 1989); Raymond Williams, “Communications, Technologies, and Social Institutions,” in What I Came to Say, ed. Raymond Williams (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 172–192; Raymond Williams, “Radical and/or Respectable,” in The Press We Deserve, ed. Richard Boston (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 14–26; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 3–119; Stuart Hall, Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson, 1980); Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (New York: Sage, 1997); Douglas Kellner, “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (New York: Sage, 2010), 7–17.

Williams encouraged historians to examine culture in totality, grappling with “relationships between elements in a whole way of life” in order to gain a better understanding of the past and its influence on present circumstances and future prospects. Williams, The Long Revolution, 63.

The thinking here stems from Antonio Gramsci's concept of ideological hegemony elaborated on in his prison notebooks. Critiquing the iron economic determinism of Marx, he explores cultural agency involved in class struggle over “common sense” logics of society. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 5–23, 229–247. Other historians such as Warren Susman and Tom Pendergast have drawn on Gramsci to note how Americans have negotiated cultural norms, values, and mores through cultural icons of the mass media. See Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 123–149; Donald Mrozek, Sport and American Mentality, 1880–1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 161–284; Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 1–29.

Frederick Allen and George Chauncey both oversimplify the struggle over sexual mores in the interwar years in an attempt to generalize about the mainstream backlash against the excesses of the Twenties. Frederick L. Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1931), 200–225; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 250–269.

Collecting primary source materials required a systematic, multi-tiered approach. Secondary literature provided evidence that there was an organized public outcry in the weeks following the December 12th Chase & Sanborn Hour. See, for example, Craig, “Out of Eden,” 232–248; Leonard, Mae West: Empress of Sex, 218–219; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 320; Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 261–272; Watts, Mae West, 230–232. A preliminary search in the ProQuest Fulltext Online Database revealed sixty-two articles about Mae West in the New York Times in the year following the broadcast; however, the most extensive coverage occurred in the month following the incident. Based on this initial analysis and in order to gain a sense of the national reaction to the broadcast, the historians mined the ProQuest Database for coverage related to West's appearance in the month following the incident. Search terms included Mae West, Adam & Eve, skit, Chase & Sanborn, NBC, and Don Ameche. The same terms and timeframe were used to search the Google News Archive and the Readers’ Guide Retrospective Index. Overall, ninety-six news stories, columns, and editorials in the Atlanta Constitution, the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Daily Globe, the Chicago Daily Tribune, the Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph-Herald, the Hartford Courant, the Los Angeles Times, the Milwaukee Journal, the Milwaukee Sentinel, the New York Times, the Pittsburgh Press, the Portsmouth Times, the Reading Eagle, the San Jose News, the Spokesman Review (Spokane, Washington), the St. Joseph (Missouri) Gazette, the Spartanburg (South Carolina) Herald-Journal, the Tuscaloosa (Alabama) News, the Washington Post, the Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator, and Time magazine were examined.

Louise Benjamin, Freedom of the Air and the Public Interest: First Amendment Rights in Broadcasting to 1935 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 226–234.

See, for example, “US Supreme Court Considers Policy on Cursing, Nudity on TV,” Voice of America, January 10, 2012, http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2012/01/10/us-supreme-court-considers-policy-on-cursing-nudity-on-tv/.

She was the firstborn of “Battlin’” Jack and Matilda, a washed-up prizefighter and a corset-maker. Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 3.

Ibid.

Clarendon's burlesque shows played in New York's cheap theaters, which attracted large working-class audiences with affordable prices and vulgar plots. Watts, Mae West, 20.

Cited in Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 3.

Richard C. Johnson, Anthony Comstock: Reform, Vice and the American Way (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 69.

White slavery here refers to the forced prostitution of white women. Andrew L. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 1–20; Andrea Friedman, Gender, Democracy and Obscenity in New York City, 1909–1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–62; Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 9–45. This is not to say that the membership of women's clubs consisted of pious old biddies. Like Jane Cunningham Croly, the founder of the women's club movement, many members of women's clubs were progressive feminists, who gained entry into the political sphere by taking part in the municipal housekeeping movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See, for example, Karen Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980); Agnes H. Gottlieb, Women Journalists and the Municipal Housekeeping Movement, 1868–1914 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 77–78. The show was notable for its introduction of the shimmy to New York and its cunning use of ad-libbed lines.

Cited in John Tuska, The Complete Films of Mae West (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 26.

Allen, Only Yesterday, 88–225.

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 86–97; Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black & White, 50–70. The play was a three-act adaption of John J. Byrne's vaudeville skit “Following the Fleet.”

Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 1–5; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 113–147; Watts, Mae West, 70–92.

Watts, Mae West, 70–92; Chauncey, Gay New York, 227–269. Chauncey notes that some members of the homosexual community dressed up as West at drag parties, and it was common for upper-class individuals to trek down to the Village and Harlem to get a taste of burlesque shows and drag parties.

Watts, Mae West, 70–92.

Ibid., 86–92.

Ibid., 95–115; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 139–148.

Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 3–5.

The studio reportedly paid West $5,000 a week, a large sum by any 1932 standard. Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 1–54; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 208.

Matthew Bernshein, Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 16–40; Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–19. After the 1915 Supreme Court ruling that freedom of speech did not extend to motion pictures, studios formed the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry in an effort to sanitize film content. The organization, however, proved largely ineffective, and after a string of risqué films and scandals involving stars such as Fatty Arbuckle in the 1920s, Protestant and Catholic leaders across the country called for government regulation of obscene material.

Black, Hollywood Censored, 21–49.

Thomas Patrick Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 3–15; Martin Quigley, Decency in Motion Pictures (New York: MacMillan, 1937), 53. The Hays Code prohibited the representation of sexual perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, childbirth, and child nudity and restricted the portrayal of adultery, sexual passion, seduction, and rape. The policy was loosely enforced and attempts to self-censor movie content in the early 1930s were largely ineffective.

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 199. As early as April 1930, Col. Jason Joy, who was appointed by Hays to oversee the enforcement of his new code, was actively discouraging Universal Studios and eventually forbidding all studios from purchasing West's Diamond Lil script.

Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 45–54; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 215–218; Watts, Mae West, 143–169.

After a six-week showdown with Hays from October 18 until December 2, 1932, the MPPDA permitted the production of Diamond Lil under a new name—She Done Him Wrong—and with the removal of sexually suggestive lines and all references to white slavery. It was released in February 1933. Following the success of the film, Paramount executives, often submitting only partial scripts to the MPPDA, pushed through the production of I’m No Angel. Released in October 1933, the box office hit about a “cooch” dancer turned vaudeville lion tamer was one of the last films in Hollywood's pre-code era to withstand significant cuts from censors. The production of sexually explicit movies such as She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I’m No Angel (1933) incurred the wrath of religious-minded reformers and more secular groups alike. For instance, in February 1932, a group of US senators introduced a resolution to investigate the motion picture industry and reconsider the government's role in reform regulation. Likewise, in the months following the release of the September 1932 Payne Fund Studies, the ire of the general public was raised against the motion picture industry. The series of sociological studies, which argued that adolescents were influenced by the sexual and violent content of films, was followed in January 1933 by rumors that incoming President Franklin D. Roosevelt might replace Hays if more stringent anti-obscenity regulations were not enforced. Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 47–48; Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood, 2; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 346.

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 251.

Black, Hollywood Censored, 163–171. If a picture was condemned, all Catholics were forbidden to see it. Despite its origin, the Legion of Decency also was supported by a number of Protestant and Jewish groups. For instance, in Nashville, Protestant ministers distributed more than 23,000 Legion pledge cards. Paul W. Facey, The Legion of Decency: A Sociological Analysis of the Emergence and Development of a Social Pressure Group (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 60.

Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 39–45.

Ibid., 45.

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 298. His comments likely were fueled by his longstanding animosity toward the performer, which others have speculated stemmed from the interracial love affair between Doll and Chan Lo in Klondike Annie; her critical comments about his mistress, Hollywood starlet Marion Davies; or her refusal to appear for free on Hearst columnist Louella Parson's Hollywood Hotel radio program. West herself speculated that his ire stemmed from his covetousness of her fame and fortune. “He hated to see a woman in his class,” she wrote in her 1959 autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It. “I didn't hold it against him.” Mae West, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 186.

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 300–301; Watts, Mae West, 217–218.

In the 1920s, debates over public interest and freedom of expression had ensued among members of the general public, business leaders, and government officials interested in the nascent field. As radio historian Robert S. Fortner noted, members of the religious community were largely absent from the discussion surrounding the development of the broadcast industry; instead, they were involved in the creation of religious productions. As a result of the church's absence from the debate, government and economic interests overshadowed concerns over the moral dimensions of public interest. These debates culminated in the Radio Act of 1927, a piece of legislation that limited the number of stations in order to provide clear reception to listeners and emphasized airing programs that had value for a general audience. As Benjamin acknowledged, the end result was the creation of a corporate-sponsored network broadcast system that catered to the anticipated desires of the middlebrow and largely supported the status quo. The diverse local programming of small stations struggled to compete against corporate-sponsored network broadcasts that appealed to large general audiences. Benjamin, Freedom of the Air, 87–88; Robert S. Fortner, Radio, Morality, and Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919–1945 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 1–20.

Hilmes, Radio Voices, 114–124.

For instance, in 1929, under the direction of the J. Walter Thompson Company, Chase & Sanborn began its nineteen-year hold over NBC's Sunday 8 p.m. timeslot. The first three years of the Chase & Sanborn program featured mostly musical offerings, but soon, like much of radio, the show's producers turned their attention to the slapstick comedy made famous on the vaudeville stage. In the process, the Chase & Sanborn Hour, like many radio programs, became dependent on vaudeville and Hollywood talent to entertain its viewers. James L. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948–1961 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 12.

Jennifer M. Proffitt, “War, Peace, and Free Radio: The Women's National Radio Committee's Efforts to Promote Democracy, 1939–1946,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 17, no. 1 (2010): 2–17; Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 153; Joel Spring, Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertisers, and Media (New York: Psychology Press, 2003), 120; Cindy C. Welch, “Broadcasting the Profession: The American Library Association and the National Children's Radio Hour” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010), 10.

Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 147. Moral guardians found an unlikely ally in America's upper-class intelligentsia, who critiqued radio networks and advertisers for failing to offer the general public “culturally uplifting” fare and for “kowtowing” to society's baser impulses in order to sell more goods. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 114–124.

Hilmes, Radio Voices, 114–124.

According to Hooper ratings, thirty percent of Americans who owned radios listened to The Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy Show (The Chase & Sanborn Hour) each Sunday night. Craig, “Out of Eden,” 245.

Ibid., 232.

Craig, “Out of Eden,” 233–235; Curry, Too Much of a Good Thing, 68, 80; Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 320; Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 262–263; Watts, Mae West, 230–232. Delivering lines such as “What are you—my friend in the grass or a snake in the grass,” West as a seductive Eve cons the snake (Bergen) into handing over the forbidden apple. NBC originally refused to release the transcript of the broadcast, but in late January 1938, Time magazine obtained an excerpt. “Business: FCC on Mae West,” Time, January 24, 1938, 51–52. In another skit during the show, West delivered still more double entendres, such as “That's all right, I like a man who takes his time. Why don’cha come home with me now, honey. I’ll let you play in my woodpile.”

Mark Pendergast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 184.

Craig argues that press reaction to the program was immediate, but it took more than four days for the incident to be mentioned in the national press. Craig, “Out of Eden,” 235.

Ed Sullivan, “Looking at Hollywood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 13, 1937, 21.

“Educator Calls Radio Program Home Menace,” Washington Post, December 16, 1937, 22. See also Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 145.

In the month following the incident, forty-eight articles appeared in the twenty-one newspapers and magazines sampled. Twenty-nine out of forty-eight articles were original reporter-generated pieces. Eleven were republished Associated Press stories.

“West Air Skit Investigated,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1937, 2.

“Apologies Follow Mae West Skit,” New York Times, December 18, 1937, 13. The Quadrangle called the broadcast a “horrible blasphemy,” reported the Times.

“Apology Is Made to Public for Mae West Broadcast,” Boston Daily Globe, December 17, 1937, 38.

Ibid.

Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 144.

“Apology Is Made to Public for Mae West Broadcast,” Boston Daily Globe, December 17, 1937, 38. West acknowledged this troubling tendency in her autobiography. “Audiences have always been pleased by what I do, and I have always been doing the same basic thing, with different trimmings,” she wrote. “It wasn't until much later that anyone, including myself, realized that it was the force of an extraordinary sex-personality that made quite harmless lines and mannerisms seem suggestive. It wasn't what I did, but how I did it. It wasn't what I said, but how I said it; and how I looked when I did it and said it. I had evolved into a symbol and didn't know it.” West, Goodness Had Nothing To Do with It, 43.

“Row Stirred by Radio Skit; Broadcasters Plan Apology,” Los Angeles Times, December, 17, 1937, 1, 14.

West, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, 194.

“Radio Officials ‘No Gentleman,’ Let Her Down, Says Mae West,” Washington Post, January 28, 1938, 3.

Ibid., 96, 195.

“Radio Officials ‘No Gentleman,’ Let Her Down, Says Mae West,” Washington Post, January 28, 1938, 3.

“Mae West Broadcast Causes Air Tempest,” Hartford Courant, December 17, 1937, 1.

“Mae West Radio Act Arouses Congressman,” Hartford Courant, December 18, 1937, 10.

See, for example, “Radio Board Orders Copy of Mae's Skit,” Atlanta Constitution, December 19, 1937, 1A; “Federal Board Calls on NBC for All Data on Mae West Skit,” Boston Daily Globe, December 19, 1937, A1; “Mae West Radio Skit on Adam and Eve Is Under Fire: Cite NBC,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 19, 1937, 7; “Copy of Mae West's Adam and Eve Demanded by Federal Commission,” Hartford Courant, December 19, 1937, 1. For instance, on December 20, the Tuscaloosa News ran an AP report about Rep. Lawrence J. Connery's (D-MA) call for the FCC to revoke the licenses of the NBC affiliates that aired the offensive broadcast. “Revoke Radio License, Congressman Demands,” Tuscaloosa News, December 20, 1937, 3. Likewise, the Boston Daily Globe reported the efforts of Massachusetts State Rep. Philip G. Bowker to create a three-member state radio commission to regulate radio in the aftermath of the West event. “Bowker Urges Radio Control; Bill Creates 3-Member State Commission: Mae West Incident Referred to by Brookline Man,” Boston Daily Globe, January 4, 1938, 13.

“NBC Forbids Use of Mae's Name on Air,” Atlanta Constitution, December 24, 1937, 1; “Criticism Leads to Banning of Mae West's Name from Air,” Baltimore Sun, December 24, 1937, 1; “Chain Cuts Out Mae West Gags,” Boston Daily Globe, December 24, 1937, 3; “Mae West's Name Ruled from Radio,” Hartford Courant, December 24, 1937, 10; “Broadcasters Bar Name of Mae West in Radio Gags,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 1937, 1; “Keep Mae West Name off Radio,” Spokesman-Review, December 24, 1937, 2; “NBC Bans Mae West's Name as Aftermath of ‘Eden’ Skit,” Washington Post, December 24, 1937, 1.

Mayme Peak, “Reel Life,” Boston Daily Globe, December 17, 1937, 38. Larry Wolters, “News of Radio,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 18, 1937, 20.

Sheilah Graham, “Hollywood Today,” Atlanta Constitution, January 8, 1938, 12; Douglas W. Churchill, “Hollywood Faces Mae Westward,” New York Times, December 26, 1937, 119.

David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), 446–450. Cited in Samantha Barbas, The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 142.

Sam Kashner and Jennifer Macnair, The Bad & the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 296.

Sheilah Graham, “Hollywood Today,” Atlanta Constitution, January 8, 1938, 12.

O. O. McIntrye, “Day by Day,” Spartanburg Herald, January 10, 1938, 4; O. O. McIntrye, “Day by Day,” Youngstown Vindicator, January 10, 1938, 7.

Ed Sullivan, “Looking at Hollywood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 16, 1937, 21; Sullivan, “Looking at Hollywood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 29, 1937, 1. Sullivan did not further indicate any additional details about when or how he had spoken to West in the column.

Chapin Hall, “What Goes On?,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1937, 2.

Theodore P. Greene, America's Heroes: The Changing Models of Success in American Magazine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 170–171.

Ethan Mordden, The Guest List: How Manhattan Defined American Sophistication—From the Algonquin Round Table to Truman Capote's Ball (New York: Macmillan, 2010), 118.

Bernie Ilson, Sundays with Sullivan: How the Ed Sullivan Show Brought Elvis, the Beatles and Culture to America (New York: Taylor Trade Publications, 2009), 33.

Sullivan, “Looking at Hollywood,” December 16, 1937, 21.

Ilson, Sundays with Sullivan, 33.

“People, Names Make News,” Time, December 27, 1937, 1, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,758847,00.html.

Craig, “Out of Eden,” 232.

Joseph F. Thorning, “Letters to the Times,” New York Times, January 11, 1938, 22.

EMMC, “Play Fair,” Hartford Courant, December 29, 1937, 8. The phrase “to endure the punishment of the Coventry” means “to be ignored or ostracized … often [by] pretending that the shunned person, although conspicuously present, can't be seen or heard,” http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/sent-to-coventry.html.

Ray Newman, “What's All the Furse?,” Washington Post, December 27, 1937, 6.

“The folks who are protesting so vigorously either liked the program or have home-made radio sets,” McCally continued. “Roses and Thorns,” Milwaukee Journal, January 9, 1938, 12.

F. Tacz, letter to the editor, Time, January 17, 1938, 6, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,758847,00.html.

“Editorial Points,” Boston Daily Globe, December 21, 1937, 14.

“Editorial Article No. 1,” Atlanta Constitution, December 31, 1937, 6.

Fred Collins cited in Arch Ward, “In the Wake of the News,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 21, 1937, 23.

As more newspapers attempted to purchase radio stations, they could curtail accusations that they were engaged in monopolistic practices if they could assert their potential to clean up the airwaves. They employed this tactic a little more than a year later in the aftermath of the controversial airing of Orson Welles's War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938. Michael Stamm, “The Sound of Print: Newspapers and the Public Promotion of Early Radio Broadcasting in the United States,” in Sound in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 238–239.

Ware, Beyond Suffrage, 2.

Marcellus, Business Girls and Two-Job Wives; Winifred Wandersee, Women's Work and Family Values, 1920–1940 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1981).

Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression, 66.

Program producers, many of whom gained their start in vaudeville, attempted to entertain audiences with clever double entendres, the content for which they had gained fame earlier in the century. The network's censors fought back. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 120–121; Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 143.

Hilmes, Radio Voices, 120–121; Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 143; Smith, Vocal Tracks, 67.

Hilmes, Radio Voices, 120.

West, Goodness Has Nothing to Do with It, 195.

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 298.

Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 184.

“Arch Oboler's Plays,” Old Time Radio, http://www.otrcat.com/arch-oboler-plays-p-1056.html.

Marcellus, Business Girls and Two-Job Wives, 147.

Louvish, Mae West: It Ain't No Sin, 395–406. West's career was revived after a series of television guest appearances in the 1960s and her role in Gore Vidal's 1970 film Myra Breckinridge.

Allen, Only Yesterday, 347–357.

Murray, “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals,” 145. As comedy writer Don Quinn wrote, everyone knew that they “better mind (their) P's and Q's, because you’re in their homes on sufferance and you might stay there for years if you remain nice people.” Baughman, Same Time, Same Station, 15.

Facey, The Legion of Decency, 1–196.

Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 267.

Joel H. Spring, Educating the Consumer-Citizen: A History of the Marriage of Schools, Advertising and Media (New York: Psychology Press, 2003), 120.

Craig, “Out of Eden,” 232–248; Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 261–272. Some groups had already identified Chase & Sanborn Hour as unfit for children. One critic, for instance, called McCarthy, the fourteen-year-old dummy, “a little vulgarian, a brassy, blustering, sniggering blockhead.” Likewise, moral reformers had singled out West on numerous occasions for her performances. Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 184.

“Educator Calls Radio Program Home Menace,” Washington Post, December 16, 1937, 22.

Allen, Only Yesterday, 200–225; Chauncey, Gay New York, 250–269.

As Craig contends, “the spontaneous flood of mail from an outraged public” was sensationalized in the press and later in academic circles. The FCC ultimately received 400 letters of complaint about the broadcast. Craig, “Out of Eden,” 233. Murray noted the tenor of comments in letters. “I deeply resent these rats invading my home. My daughter now scoffs at all religion,” an Illinois mother wrote in a letter to the FCC. Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 264. In January 1938, Time magazine reported that NBC was “showered” with “1,000 odd letters of criticism.” “Business: FCC on Mae West,” Time, January 24, 1938, 1, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,758999,00.html. Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 264.

Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 264. Likewise, when asked whether a government bureau should be established to supervise the production of radio programs in March 1939, sixty percent of the more than 5,000 individuals surveyed in the Roper/Fortune Survey indicated that a bureau should not be created. Roper/Fortune Survey, March 1939, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu. One reader's letter to the editor condemned NBC for censuring West—“all because she had portrayed the type of ‘cumup girl’ for which she is famed.” Walter H. Kelly, “Critics of Mae West Have Another Chance,” Pittsburgh Press, January 8, 1938, 4.

Murray, “Mae West and the Limits of Radio Censorship in the 1930s,” 264. When asked in a 1939 Roper/Fortune Survey whether a government bureau should be established to supervise the production of radio programs, sixty percent of the more than five thousand respondents indicated that a bureau should not be created. Roper/Fortune Survey, March 1939, http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.