Made In America - Bill Bryson [205]
As late as 1943, when a husband’s homosexuality was a factor in a sensational murder trial, few newspapers could bring themselves to describe his affliction. One described the man as having ‘indications of an abnormal psychological nature’.43 Rape was commonly euphemized to assault, as in the famous – but probably apocryphal and certainly undocumented – story of an attacker who ‘repeatedly struck and kicked his victim, hurled her down a flight of stairs and then assaulted her’.
Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives – darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, gosh-dang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshophat and others almost without number – but even these cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s. Mencken notes how a federal judge in New York threatened a lawyer with contempt for having the impertinence to utter ‘darn’ in his court. Esquire magazine found itself hauled into court by the Postmaster General in 1943 for daring to print backside, behind and bawdy house in various issues. It wasn’t even necessary to say a word to cause offence. During World War II, an anti-German song called ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ was banned from the nation’s airwaves because it contained a Bronx cheer.
Television too had a self-imposed code of ethics. As early as 1944, when Norma Martin and Eddie Cantor sang a duet called ‘We’re Having a Baby, My Baby and Me’, and accompanied it with a little hula dance, the cameraman was ordered to blur the image.44 On an early talk show, when the English comedian Beatrice Lillie jokingly remarked of belly dances that she had ‘no stomach for that kind of thing’, it caused a small scandal. In the early 1950s, after an Arkansas Congressman with the God-fearing name of Ezekiel C. Gothings held hearings on sex and violence on television, the networks adopted their own code which essentially decreed that nothing immoral would appear on America’s airwaves.45
Thus in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant, the term wasn’t permitted. She was expecting. Nor was it just sex that prompted censorship. In 1956, when Rod Serling wrote a script about a black youth in Mississippi who is murdered after whistling at a white woman, the producers of US Steel Hour enthusiastically went along with the idea – so long as the victim wasn’t black, wasn’t murdered and didn’t live in the deep South.
Books by comparison showed much greater daring. Fucking appeared in a novel called Strange Fruit as early as 1945, and was banned in Massachusetts as a result. The publishers took the state to court, but the case fell apart when the defence attorney arguing for its sale was unable to bring himself to utter the objectionable word in court, in effect conceding that it was too filthy for public consumption.46 In 1948 Norman Mailer caused a sensation by including pissed off in The Naked and the Dead. Three years later, America got its first novel to use four-letter words extensively when James Jones’s From Here to Eternity was published. Even there the editors were at sixes and sevens over which words to allow. They allowed fuck and shit (though not without excising about half of such appearances from the original manuscript) but drew the line at cunt and prick.47
Against such a background dictionary makers became seized with uncertainty. In the 1960s the Merriam-Webster Dictionary broke new ground by including a number of taboo words – cunt, shit and prick – but lost its nerve when it came to fuck. Mario Pei protested the omission in the New York Times but of course