Wolcott Gibbs Tonight: "The Mantle of Comstock" -- how our self-appointed moral guardians do their dirty work

"Of the sixteen Protestant clergymen who signed a resolution condemning Dorothy Baker's play called Trio, it appears that only one . . . had bothered to see the darn thing."

-- Wolcott Gibbs, the start of "The Mantle of Comstock"

by Ken

Last week we got a glimpse of one of The New Yorker's most important and yet today little-known writers and editors, Wolcott Gibbs, and got a brief sampling of his own voice in his New York Times remembrance, "Robert Benchley: In Memoriam."

For tonight I promised another Gibbs piece, written as a function of his tenure as theater critic of The New Yorker. (He had succeeded Benchley in the job in 1938.) This piece that doesn't so much give us an authorial voice as make a point that I think resonates pretty loudly down through the fair number of decades that have passed since. The piece, called "The Mantle of Comstock" (1944), is about the way self-styled guardians of morality go about imposing their often-crackpot views of morallity on a public that never asked them.


FOR A "COMSTOCK" REFRESHER AND TO READ
"THE MANTLE OF COMSTOCK," CLICK HERE


TOMORROW in WOLCOTT GIBBS TONIGHT: "To a Little Girl at Christmas" ("How a famous question might be answered if it were asked today and Mr. Westbrook Pegler happened to be writing editorials for 'The Sun'")


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT,
WILL CUPPY TONIGHT, and now WOLCOTT GIBBS TONIGHT):
Check out the series to date

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