About
8,000 copies were sold under this contract. Two years later, in July,
1916, the Society for the Suppression of Vice threatened to begin a
prosecution unless the book was withdrawn. It was withdrawn forthwith,
and Dreiser was compelled to enter suit for a performance of the
contract. The withdrawal, it will be noticed, was not in obedience to a
court order, but followed a mere comstockian threat. Yet Dreiser was at
once deprived of his royalties, and forced into expensive litigation.
Had it not been that eminent counsel volunteered for his defence, his
personal means would have been insufficient to have got him even a day
in court.
[74] The chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of moving
pictures. What they face at the hands of imbecile State boards of
censorship is described at length by Channing Pollock in an article
entitled "Swinging the Censor" in the _Bulletin_ of the Authors' League
of America for March, 1917.
[75] For example, the magazine which printed David Graham Phillips'
Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall as a serial prefaced it with a moral
encomium by the Rev.
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