Sixty thousand copies of the May edition of the American Mercury, the monthly magazine edited by H. L. Mencken, were destroyed early Saturday morning on the order of the editor because they contained an article entitled “Sex and the Co-Ed,” purporting to be an expose of collegiate undergraduate life, it was learned this week.
This number of copies had been run from the presses of the Hudson Craftsman, Camden, N. J., which prints the magazine, when a man, reported to be Mencken himself, rushed into the pressroom and ordered the machine stopped.
The man ordered the plate containing the story taken down from the presses and broken up. He then issued an order that all of the 60,000 copies be burned, the type destroyed, and warned that any employee of the printing establishment who attempted to leave the building with a copy of the magazine would be dismissed instantly. The presses were held while a substitute story was set in type and the entire edition reprinted.
Horace Donnelley, Solicitor-General at Washington, when asked whether this action might have been precipitated by an order or suggestion from the Post Office Department that inclusion of the story might result in the issue being barred from the mails, replied that he had not seen a copy of the Mercury until after the article had been deleted. At that time, he said, the magazine was ruled admissible to the mails.
The April issue of the Mercury was declared unfit for the mails because because of a story called “Hatrack,” written by a New York newspaper man, and dealing with the life of an immoral woman in a small Western town. When Mencken was reached in Baltimore by telephone and asked about the affair, he said:
“It so happens that a story can be advertised to appear and then doesn’t. There was nothing dangerous about the story. It was perfectly harmless. I don’t care to be interviewed about it.”—New York American.
Palisadian, Cliffside Park, NJ, May 7, 1926